


What Lies Between Us

by JSevick



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alias AU, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M, Loosely based on Alias, Only Part 2 is Explicit, Sharing a Bed, Undercover, Undercover as a Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-10 00:05:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5561089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JSevick/pseuds/JSevick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Felicity Smoak discovers the covert branch of the CIA she works for is actually a terrorist cell, she becomes a double agent for the real CIA to take them down. But lying to her boss, going on undercover missions, and risking death at every turn isn’t the hardest part of her new job… It’s dealing with the other double agent working with her, the colleague she’s had a crush on since even before she discovered that they both know the dangerous truth—Oliver Queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my fic for the Olicity Fanfic Big Bang!! Of course I had to do an Alias AU (although it's a fairly loose interpretation). :)
> 
> A HUGE thanks to the admins of the OFBB, my amazing cheerleader Brianna (@muchablogaboutnothing), my awesome and patient beta Simran (@the-silverforked-sky), and my very cool artist Eva (@funstory). Check out my Tumblr (@jsevick) to see her artwork for the story!
> 
> I hope you enjoy the tropey spies fun! :D

Felicity Smoak knows many things. 

And she’ll tell you all of them, mostly unasked—something she’s working on, but her brain is always running and her mouth follows helplessly after and the whole system might just be out to get her for all the coffee she drowns it in… It’s part of what comes with being an MIT graduate and a ninja hacker goddess and one of the top recruits the government has ever had—the knowing of things. 

So she knows the next moment will define her entire life.

Or end it.

No amount of breathing calms the churning ache in her stomach as she stares at the glass and steel building before her. The hand she wraps around the strap of her shoulder bag is slick with sweat, the cheekbones beneath the frames of her glasses pulsing with nervous heat, the bottom lip caught between her teeth quivering slightly. She peers back over her shoulder as she crosses the concrete plaza, watching the people meandering about in suits and sunglasses for signs that any of them are following her. 

Always watching for the flash of sunlight across the barrel of a gun. 

Would the dark of night have been better for this? Or is broad daylight still sufficient cover from a bold assassination? Would her death even be considered an “assassination,” or just plain “murder”? What does it take to get that morbid upgrade?

“And what does it say about me that I kind of want at least that much, if I’m going to die for this?” she mutters to herself--realizing, at the heads turning her way, that she’s been muttering aloud the whole time. 

The agonizing minutes it takes to cross the plaza are some of the longest of her life, as she waits with every step for a bullet to break through her spine or the back of her skull, splattering her across the potted plants and crowded benches. But she reaches the glass doors and slides inside with a long exhaled breath, taking a moment inside the vestibule to regain whatever calm she can. 

She’s made it this far—but it’s only the beginning. 

The tiles on the floor of the lobby are arranged into the symbol of the CIA, a bold declaration for such a secretive organization. But it’s the only way she could be sure it was truly  _ them _ , truly the good guys (or at least the legally sanctioned ones)—meeting some blandly nondescript man in a trench coat at the top of a parking garage was only going to get her back to where this all started… or worse. 

So Felicity steps up to the counter, as though this were the DMV instead of the Central Intelligence Agency, and waits for the woman with the headset to turn towards her with a polite smile. 

“I need to speak to Director Devlan,” Felicity says, keeping her words simple. She needs to appear sane and intelligent—not rambling and incoherent. Otherwise the suits in the corner, with hands clasped in front of their gun-laden belts and the white corded ear buds waiting to hiss orders, will be tackling her against the shiny colorful tiles in a heartbeat. 

“I’m sorry, miss, but the Director does not take personal meetings without a cleared appointment,” the woman says, kindly enough, but with a firm undertone that belies years of experience turning down everyone you might expect to walk into the CIA Headquarters.

Felicity should have expected as much, should have  _ known _ … These last couple days have turned everything she thought she knew into an elaborate code even she can’t put back together into anything resembling reality. 

“Please, I… I have to…” She closes her eyes before she either bursts into tears or starts babbling incessantly. With a breath, she reopens them, remembering the research she’d done before coming here; research always makes her feel better. “Please tell him he has a walk-in.” 

The word changes something in the woman’s eyes, from blankly polite to sharp and focused, as she speaks in a low and rapid tone into her headset. Then she walks around the edge of her desk, leading Felicity towards the elevators and between the tensing suits, who nod at them once the woman flashes the plastic key card clipped to her lapel. 

But Felicity isn’t taken to the Director. Instead, she’s left in a nondescript conference room with a pad of yellow paper and a pen, told to write out her statement in as much detail as possible. Now her brain supplies words in abundance, clarifying every statement with two or three more, telling the story that brought her here… 

The sunny day on the quad at MIT her junior year, where the man with the business card approached her and told her she could save the world, was in some ways when her life began. She’d always pictured herself working with some kind of computer security, fighting hackers around the globe through thickets of code and fortresses made of firewalls--but this was different. This was  _ actually _ saving the world and taking on bad guys; this was the kind of thing movies were made of, and they wanted  _ her _ to be a part of it. 

Before that moment, Felicity had thought of herself as a boring IT girl, at least until she perfected her polymorphic anti-hacking virus that could evolve to take down any threat--even then, her life wasn’t going to be something that people wanted to hear about at parties. 

After that moment, she was a spy, working for a branch of the CIA so covert it couldn’t even be associated with them, taking down terrorists and snagging bombs and contraband from around the world before the black market could grab them. Okay, so she still couldn’t talk about it at parties; but at least she knew that if she did, it would be interesting. 

She started her job at SD-6, an appropriately shadowy name, right after college--disappearing into a hidden basement at the “bank” where it was held. (Now, sitting in this conference room, she writes about the extreme security measures and the lie detector tests and the stocked armory. She writes about the contracts she signed that promised death to anyone she told--she thought that’s just what spies had to do. She’d even joked about saying, “If I tell you, I’d have to kill you,” because that was one thing the movies got right, apparently. She should have known the movies never got anything right.) 

From the start of her work there, she knew she wouldn’t be out in the field, pulling knives from sheaths strapped to her thighs or swinging on zip lines across European rooftops… She’d be doing what she was born to do, hacking and developing tech for the real spies. In the room with the long glass table and the computer screens, where pictures of foreign criminals flashed like a bullseye on the wall, she made her tech presentations to the agents before their missions. She felt like she was finally  _ doing _ something with her life, when she handed their gear across the table to the ones going out in the field, when she listened to their successes on the comms as she walked them through using her tech… 

When she tried (and failed) not to stare helplessly across the room at… (She manages to stop herself before she writes that.)

Felicity never thought she’d have friends like the men and women she worked with every day, who were patient with her even when she rambled incoherently, who did their work with a determination and a selflessness even when the world would never know, who all think that the organization they might die for is working to protect this country…

Who have all been lied to. Just like her.

The door to the room opens suddenly and she jumps, but the man stepping in apologizes with a small half-smile, setting down a cup of coffee and a donut in front of her. He’s huge, arms bulging beneath the white sleeves of his shirt, hair shaved close to his head. 

“John Diggle,” he says to introduce himself. 

“Felicity Smoak,” she says quietly. Her hand aches as she sets down the pen, not certain if she relayed everything clearly enough, if she made sure they knew that her colleagues don’t know… 

That  _ they’re _ the terrorists. 

“Thank you for coming in today, Felicity,” he says, already casual and kind. His deep voice plus the strong grip of his hand as he shakes hers are the first fleeting comforts she has felt in days. 

“I had to,” she says. “Well, I didn’t  _ have _ to, I guess—I could have pretended I didn’t see those files, or quit or something—although I’m starting to think I couldn’t have quit, with all those ‘security’ measures I never really thought about before… I would have been ‘terminated,’ you know? But I didn’t come here because of that, I came because…”

“You had to,” he says, tone full of understanding, and it’s not often someone reacts to her rants like that. She finds herself smiling at the man, already feeling safer. 

“They don’t know.” She’s still got her hand in his, but now she’s tightening her hold around his fingers. “The people I work with, they don’t know what we really do, who we really work for—they’re good people, I  _ swear _ . Some of the best, please don’t-”

“We know, Felicity,” he says. His other hand pulls the pad of paper across the table towards him. “We still have to verify your statement, but we know all about SD-6. And we know they advertise themselves to their employees as a covert branch of the CIA.” 

“You do?” Her voice goes small. “And you haven’t stopped them?” 

Diggle sighs, sliding his hand out of her grasp, folding his fingers together and setting his hands on the table. “It is not as simple as it looks. SD-6 is itself a branch of a larger organization-”

“The Alliance,” she supplies, as his eyebrows go up. “I accidentally hacked into their server, I saw… I saw what SD-6 really is. What the Alliance really is.” 

She remembers the way the code had gotten away from her, when she’d reached for another strand of licorice to chew on and clicked on the wrong file, opening a series of prompts and access points she’d never seen before. Maybe it was a bit of boredom, maybe it was exhaustion after a long day spent fruitlessly hacking a remote hard drive (for what turned out to be just a squeaky clean bus driver with a penchant for hoarding building schematics as a hobby), maybe it was just her being thorough. 

Maybe it was that she basically solved mysteries for a living, and here was one lurking a few clicks away. 

And suddenly there it was… the  _ truth _ . 

SD-6 was not a branch of the CIA, she’d learned in an instant; it was a branch of the Alliance, an immense and complex network of rogue spies, all leading international cells of terrorists pretending to be covert intelligence operations for governments of the world… and convincing their oblivious employees to play along. 

To think they’re saving their country while they’re actually destroying it. 

Felicity’s hands curl into fists in her lap, and she leans forward. “I want to help. Stop them, I mean. I’ll do anything.” 

Diggle nods, looking down at her written statement, the untidy scrawl of blue ink on yellow legal paper. “Well, this is a good start, and it’s one way to do this. You can give us all the intel you have and we can extract you safely.” Now he looks at her, and the way his eyes assess her is as piercing as the flash of the X-ray cameras at the SD-6 entrance. “Or you can go back there.” 

“Go… back?” she asks, and she sees the way he watches her process this, carefully, tense. This is the moment she will decide her fate. “You mean like a double agent? A mole?” 

“Yes,” he says simply. “It would be extremely dangerous—no one would blame you if you choose not to do this. But… we could always use another double agent in SD-6, helping us take them down from the inside. Helping us figure out what their ultimate plan really is.”

Felicity takes a breath, about to agree wholeheartedly, because even the threat of death can’t quite scrub the lives she may have helped destroy from her skin and soul—when her brain leaps ahead of her mouth, for once. 

“Wait…  _ another _ double agent?”

XXXXX

After a barrage of paperwork, psych evaluations, and cross-referenced facts, Felicity is officially a double agent for the CIA. She pictures smoky back alleys, dead drops in the park, code names whispered hastily into pay phones, long silencer barrels edging out of flapping trench coats… 

Okay, she tries  _ not _ to picture the last one. 

But right now, Diggle is leading her through a storage facility that looks more like a parking garage, with flickering flourescent lights and metal fencing like cages, between concrete pillars and through a strong smell of damp stone and moth balls. She adjusts her glasses over her nose, making sure her hair is smoothed back into a ponytail at the base of her neck, tucking down the lapels of her black jacket. Not a trench coat, not yet. 

She’s not really sure what to think about the other double agent. They’re one of the good guys, working for the CIA all this time—but they’ve been lying to her, to everyone, letting them continue to hurt people and end lives for their criminal bosses while thinking they’re heroes. 

Now she has to do the same thing. 

Diggle stops to open the metal grate, and Felicity can’t see around his large frame and the boxes piled strategically within to see who waits for them. It’s not until she’s stepping in behind him, almost too nervous and fidgety to pay attention to Diggle’s greeting as she peeks around his broad shoulders… that she wonders how she ever thought it would be anyone else. 

Oliver Queen’s face doesn’t change too much as he takes her in, other than the small parting of his lips (that she should  _ not _ be staring at) and the twitch of his eyebrows, and then he says in a quiet tone, “Felicity?” 

There he stands, in dark slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, the same tall, solid form that draws her eyes around the offices of SD-6 like a beacon. And that stubbled jaw, the handsome and angular face, the hands that twitch at his sides with callused fingers that scrape against hers when she hands him the tech for a mission… The best operative SD-6 has, having survived five years on an extended black ops mission; the man she’s had a crush on for what feels like forever.

And a double agent. 

“Um, hi.” She stands beside Diggle, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder, unsure if she should keep staring at Oliver but unable to look away.“So you’re… And now I’m… This is… Huh. Being speechless is weird.” 

“How did this happen?” Oliver asks, tone slightly harsh, looking at Diggle. 

“She was a walk-in,” Diggle replies. 

“I found the Alliance Server,” Felicity says, when his eyes fall back on her. “Not the actual thing, of course, but the files—right at the core of the SD-6 system. Right there, for anyone to find. Well, anyone with an advanced degree in computer science and access to our mainframe, but still… Not even encrypted.” She looks down at the concrete floor. “Like they don’t even care enough to hide them.” 

“Felicity, I…” Oliver’s voice is soft. She peeks up at him, just beneath the top of her glasses, to see him frowning. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s not your fault—you’re trying to stop them, right? I just can’t believe… this whole time—I thought I was doing something good, you know?” She blinks rapidly and shakes her head, smiling bashfully. “I’ll get it together, don’t worry. I know spies don’t cry.” 

“You’re not extracting her?” he asks Diggle, who shakes his head, but Felicity cuts in before he can reply. 

“No, I want to help.” She steps forward, standing between the two men, looking up into those sharp blue eyes. “Even if I didn’t know I was doing it, I’ve helped  _ them _ . I’ve done terrible things, and now I want to do everything I can to undo that… if it’s even possible.” 

Maybe the blood on her hands isn’t as thick or dark as what’s splattered across the agents in the field, since she was far away behind a computer while they stole and destroyed and… killed. She’d never liked the killing, though it was mostly in self-defense--but she’d told herself it was for the good of the world, getting rid of the bad guys so innocent people could sleep peacefully at night. And yet… all along, they  _ were _ the bad guys. 

She realizes  _ she’s _ someone they should have gotten rid of. Fresh guilt stabs through her, and she takes a shaky breath to stay focused on the moment. 

On Oliver, who’s watching her with a sympathetic glance. 

“None of that was your fault, any of you,” he says, and she knows he’s talking about their other colleagues at SD-6. “Felicity, you were doing a job you thought was serving your country. None of you are responsible for what SD-6 has tricked you into doing—and the CIA knows that.” 

“But every time I’ve hacked a database, or delivered a program, or invented tech that someone uses to… hurt someone, someone I  _ thought _ was a bad guy but now… Oliver, I…” 

He blinks at the sound of his name, and suddenly the air heats with a thick tension that locks their eyes together. When they interact at the office, it’s always been fairly perfunctory, professional, even distant. Of course, she’s held onto every time he smiles when she rambles off track in a meeting, or the way he catches her elbows to steady her when she rounds the corner into his hard frame, or the feeling of his presence standing behind her at her computer as she points out something on the schematics (while imagining his hand on her shoulder or him leaning in to kiss the top of her head)—but that’s just her. 

What she sees in his eyes now, as they search her own, is… more. New. As though what held him back before wasn’t a lack of want but a wall of secrets. 

A secret she now shares. 

Then he blinks again as his gaze hardens and it’s gone. 

Felicity looks away, somehow resisting the urge to roll her eyes at herself. Why is she thinking about this right now? They’re hiding in a storage locker discussing her crimes against humanity and her potential for imminent death, and her imagination’s turning this into a romantic rendezvous. With all the romance of damp concrete and flickering flourescent lights and a tense CIA agent watching them. 

_ Focus _ , she tells herself, as Oliver crosses his arms over his chest. 

“This is extremely dangerous,” he says. “Just coming to the CIA in the first place was-”

“I had to,” she says, repeating what she had said to Diggle. “Once I knew what they were doing, what we had been doing, what Malcolm…” 

It’s the first time she has said her boss’s name out loud, after writing it into the statement several hundred times. Malcolm Merlyn, the man with the flashing smile and confident air, who calls her “Ms. Smoak,” and directs their mission parameters with a smirking patriotism that now sickens her with the memory of it. He’d recruited her personally, had praised her when she’d hacked the unhackable, had been charming and intimidating and someone she actually enjoyed working for.

When all along he’s been working for the Alliance, sending his agents out to steal intel and devices for his own nefarious plans, with a smug lie about duty and honor. Now her stomach churns just at the thought of him.  

By the way Oliver’s jaw tightens, he’s thinking the same thing. 

“We know all about Malcolm Merlyn,” Diggle says with a sigh. “But we can’t take him down until we know exactly what he’s up to, or the rest of the Alliance will just finish the job. We know he’s got some grand plan he’s working towards, but until we know what it is, we can’t bring him in. And that’s where you two come in.” 

“Digg,” Oliver says, gruffly. 

“We can use her, Oliver. Someone with her skills, on the inside, another set of eyes and ears on Merlyn and the rest.”

“If they even suspect the truth…” he says, frowning.

“They’ll kill me. I know.” Felicity swallows, because those aren’t idle words or an exaggeration. She’s seen the security section orders, the suddenly bare desks and empty chairs, the names never spoken again. She’s even attended a few of the funerals, lied to family members about car accidents and heart attacks at the bank. For a brief moment, she wonders what they’d tell her mother if it happened to her. 

But she means it when she adds,“This is worth the risk.” 

When Oliver shakes his head, she reaches out and sets a hand on the arms crossed over his chest. His skin is warm beneath her palm, and hers tingles at the lingering touch. 

“You made the same choice once, didn’t you? You know it’s worth it.” 

He sighs. “We do this my way, though. You find something, bring it to me first. Limit your contact with Digg or the CIA to keep yourself safe.” 

The look he sends Digg is uncompromising, but Digg just nods. “I’m okay with that—as long as you know in the end, she’s a CIA asset. If we have to send her out in the field, we will.” 

“Not alone,” Oliver says stiffly. 

“That sounds fine to me,” Felicity asks, only a little miffed that this conversation seems to be happening more around her than with her. “I mean, there’s a reason I’m behind a desk. I can’t break my precious hands punching people. Not that your hands aren’t precious, because they… are not something I think about, actually. Ever.” 

His smirk and the quick shake of his head is familiar, something anchoring her in this new reality—this tiny, secret world she now inhabits with him (and Digg). A world of death around every corner, in every whisper, behind every glance. A world she should be terrified to have awoken in. 

A world that might just have everything she’s ever wanted. 

XXXXX

Somehow everything can change in an instant—and yet when you look around, nothing has changed at all. 

Felicity walks through the lobby at Credit Dauphine, the “bank” where she works, seeing the same smiling security guard at the desk and the milling crowds with their shoes clicking over the marble tile and even Frank, the armed guard in the “executive” elevator that takes her down into SD-6… All going on with their lives as though the world hadn’t flipped upside down overnight. 

As she steps out into the bright white room beyond the elevator, she wonders if their scans will pick up her elevated heart rate, the cold sweat gathering in her armpits, the fluttering nerves in her stomach—does she have a story for if they do? A big presentation coming up? A hot date? 

Oliver Queen’s face flashes into her mind at the thought, and suddenly her heart is pounding for an entirely different reason. That, at least, she can tell them about and not be killed (other than death by embarrassment; there’s a reason it’s called “mortification”). 

But should she even acknowledge him if she sees him? Will the truth be written across her face? And which truth—the one that would get her killed? Or the one that risks her heart? 

The rows of desks beneath the exposed pipes and hanging fluorescent lights are filled with the familiar faces, some of which smile at her in welcome and others that don’t even turn her way. She cuts through them hastily, trying not to make eye contact, or smiling too brightly at others as though the sheer force of her cheer is a defense against suspicion. 

She’s not even halfway through the room before she seeks him out, looking towards the gathering of desks in the corner where he usually sits. She sees Tommy Merlyn, Malcolm’s son and another successful agent (who must be unaware of his father’s evil, she thinks with a pang of hope, because he’s always been so kind to her); he’s smiling and flirting with Laurel Lance, one of their mission ops consultants—and her sister, Sara, a field agent who’s been nice enough to teach Felicity a few things in the training room. Roy Harper stands beside them, looking a little sulky now as he stares down at his phone. Rumor is that he’s been flirting with Oliver’s little sister outside the agency, a dangerous game on several fronts. 

All of them must be oblivious to what it is they’re really doing here, as they smile and laugh and tease, convinced they’re heroes so selfless and brave that the world will never know their names. 

Then she sees him, walking in from one of the hallways, sleeves rolled up to display those muscular forearms as his hands hang at his side. His eyes automatically search the room, trained to assess threats and exits and tools, and when they fall on her like a strike of lightning, she’s not sure what he sees. 

But for just a moment, they stare at one another across the room, frozen in place, locked into that tiny secret world. Before, she had only ever watched him from a distance, as her eyes traced the muscles of his back surging beneath the fabric of his shirts, gazing helplessly at the way his arms strained against his sleeves. When he did glance at her, it was quick and friendly—she couldn’t help imagining a softness, a gentle amusement, a lingering when she rapidly turned away… well, she won’t blame herself for her fantasies. This was always a tough job. 

But  _ now _ , now when he looks back at her—he  _ sees _ her, and there’s no denying the intensity in his eyes, all fixed on her. Maybe it’s just the danger they now share; maybe it’s that he’s no longer alone in his deadly game; maybe it’s the lifeline and new ally she represents. 

Or maybe it’s something more. Her job did just get much harder; maybe she can allow herself a new and wilder fantasy as her prize. 

Oliver is swallowed into the group of agents at the desks, a reluctant smile on his face at something teasing Tommy says to him—but now she recognizes the slight strain of the expression. Tearing her eyes away, she continues walking through the center aisle of the room, towards her office at the back. 

Normally, her office with the foggy glass walls is piled high with crates full of loose wires and circuit boards, cameras and microphones (getting tinier and tinier as she tries to cram them into different random objects), hard drives and half-built computers. 

Today, it’s filled with Malcolm Merlyn. 

Felicity stumbles to a stop in the doorframe, clutching her shoulder bag against her chest as though it might keep her racing heart from leaping out of her body, hoping her wide eyes and loud gasp can be written off as simply being startled—rather than terrified. 

“Ms. Smoak,” Malcolm says, smiling at her, seemingly unperturbed. “I am sorry to have frightened you.” 

“Oh,  _ frightened _ , no, why would I be frightened? You’re my boss and I love you— _ not _ love you, I didn’t mean that, I meant I respect you, in a professional way, very professional.” Felicity stopped to breathe, her cheeks burning, her mind scrambling. She had overcompensated  _ way _ too much, but if Malcolm decided she had some weird crush on him, that might at least cover for her odd behavior. 

But Malcolm just smiles wider, apparently used to this sort of rambling from her. “Ms. Smoak, you never cease to entertain.” 

“Happy to, sir,” she mumbles, fidgeting with her glasses just to do something with her trembling hands. “Was there something I could… help you with?” 

More murdering and crime? More lying? More killing of any colleagues that got out of line? 

Now her frightened expression must be something more like burning rage, and she realizes she might be sending very mixed signals if he’s paying any attention. If she has to, she’ll blame PMS; men never understand it and don’t like to ask too many questions. 

“It’s about the mission report you submitted the other day—it was very… interesting,” he says, hands folded in front of him, and she looks away to drop her things on her desk. How is she supposed to stare this man in the face, day after day, and act like nothing has changed? 

“Oh?” she asks, booting up her computers. 

“You’re sure the data storage facility in London cannot be hacked remotely?” 

Felicity has to think, for a moment, because the mission report she submitted came from another world entirely. Has it really only been a day since she found out the truth? And if he really suspected she might know, would he waste time pretending to just go on with their work?

But then, apparently, he’s spent the entire time she’s been working here just pretending. What else did she really expect?

“Um, yes, sir, I’m sure,” she says, pulling up the files to refresh her memory; she’s never really had to do that before. “The site has a military grade encryption, requiring someone with the ability to solve polymorphic algorithms in real time. I’ve been trying to write a virus that can be uploaded by an agent in the field, but so far no software or tool could do it faster or better than a person.” 

“Than you, you mean,” Malcolm says from right behind her, and she nearly jumps again. 

She swallows. “Unless you know anyone else who likes polymorphic algorithms—then them, for sure. But, I guess, me. I could do it.” 

“Only on site.”

With a strange, twisting feeling at where this is headed, she says simply, “Yes.” 

“Excellent—get prepped for the trip to London immediately. I want those Echelon files on our server as soon as possible.” 

“You want… Wait,  _ me _ , out in the field? Alone?” Felicity gapes at him, wondering if this isn’t some grand cosmic trick. Just when she thought her life had reached ultimate complexity, that the new world she’d found had at least a somewhat stable path to follow, the ground is ripped out from beneath her. 

“No, not alone—you’re not field-rated. We’ll send you with someone.” 

“I’ll go,” says a familiar voice from her doorway, and she spins on her desk chair to see Oliver standing stiffly just inside her office. She’s not sure how long he’s been there; his expression is tense, his eyebrows drawn low over his eyes. But just him standing there, just his presence, floods her with a relief so profound she has to fight to keep it from showing on her face. 

“Listening in, were you?” Malcolm says, still smiling that smug grin. “That’s what I get for working with spies.” 

“This is about the Echelon files we failed to get from Kuvay, right?” Oliver asks, stepping further into the room. Is it her imagination, or does he inch towards her side, as though preparing to move all the way between her and Malcolm at any moment? 

“We found a back-up in storage at a facility in London. Ms. Smoak was just drawing up the specs—but it looks like she’ll need to access the servers in person.” Malcolm squints, looking Oliver up and down, one half of his face twisted up. “And you were volunteering to escort her?” 

“I’d like to see this mission complete,” Oliver says plainly. That hint of strain is back behind his eyes, but Felicity’s starting to think maybe she’s the only one who sees it. Her fantasies are running away with her. 

“Should be a simple enough op—if you really want to-”

“I do.” 

Malcolm narrows his eyes again, but then he blinks and smiles. “Well, then, that’s settled. I’ll get the ops consultants to start preparing the itinerary.” 

Felicity doesn’t quite breathe again until Malcolm has left the room, the back of his black suit disappearing down the corridor to his office. When he’s far enough away, Oliver closes her office door, holding up a finger to his lips when she opens her mouth to speak. 

The pen he pulls from his pocket emits a high-pitched beep once he clicks it, a screech that grates like nails on a chalkboard--but she recognizes the frequency jammer for what it is. 

“Two minutes,” he says quietly, “and no protection against anyone listening through the walls.” 

“Got it,” she replies in a whisper. 

“Are you okay? I saw Malcolm in here…” He steps up in front of her, reaching out one hand towards her shoulder, then drops it at the last moment. 

“I told him I love him,” she says, as Oliver’s eyebrows go up. “I don’t, obviously, I just panicked—apparently, when I’m scared, I tell people I love them, but I never say it when I actually…” She manages to stop herself and look away at the same time, lest he see the obvious in her eyes. But when she looks back, his gaze is merely sympathetic. 

“It will get easier,” he says softly. “The lying.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and then remembers that there’s more to discuss here than her eternal awkwardness. “What about the mission? How do we keep SD-6 from getting the Echelon files?” 

“The CIA has a virus that can wipe the hard-drive and make it look like a failsafe that Kuvay installed himself,” Oliver says. 

“Okay, that could work—I’ll have to make it better so that it looks like something even I couldn’t stop—but I should do it after transmitting the files to the CIA, right?” This is the part she’s still unsure of; trusting the CIA just as blindly as she once trusted SD-6. She’s not sure she could handle another betrayal of everything she thought she knew. 

Oliver opens his mouth to reply, clearly in the affirmative, when the pen beeps again to tell them the two minutes have passed. Instead, their gazes linger on each other as he nods. His hand lifts again, this time settling briefly on her shoulder with a heat that sears through her thin sweater, before he turns away and leaves the room. 

Felicity takes a deep breath, her fingers shaking as she holds them over her keyboard, uncertain what to focus on in the maelstrom of her emotions. There’s the hovering panic buzzing in the back of her mind, as she sits within the lion’s den and waits for the predator to smell his prey’s fear. And the guilt, a twisting pang every so often shooting through her chest, when she sees a colleague laugh or grin as though the hard day’s work they’re doing isn’t their own worst nightmare--as she sits there and tells them nothing. The anger doesn’t surprise her, with Malcolm gone from her office; now she can focus less on the threat he poses, and more on the image of his whimpering form being dragged away in handcuffs. 

And then there’s Oliver… whose touch she can still feel against her shoulder, whose soft voice still rings in her ears. She’d thought her crush on him was just the height and the broad shoulders and the way he smiled when she stumbled over her words. Now, knowing the way he’s risked his life every day for  _ years _ , the way seeing him standing in her doorway had made her feel  _ safe,  _ the way she thinks back over every mission they’ve worked together, every civilian he’s tried so hard to protect… 

This is more than just a crush. She tells herself it’s the worst thing that could be happening right now--with, you know,  _ death _ being a very real possibility. Not the best time to be spiraling over her feelings for Oliver Queen. Besides, there’s nothing that’s going to happen there; he’s just protecting her as he would protect anyone, because that’s who he is. .   

With a groan, Felicity turns back to her computer, determined not to think about the crinkles around his blue eyes when he smiles or the huff of breath when she surprises him or the time she saw him training shirtless (the multiple times, she admits to herself, because each one is an exquisite experience in her mind and maybe she didn’t  _ have _ to take that path to the break room but it wasn’t  _ that _ far out of her way and…).  

When trying not to think about him doesn’t work, she sighs and lets herself fall into her fantasies, where Oliver wraps his arms around her from behind and holds her safe in his arms—a warm, simple world she never needs to leave. A world where Malcolm was never here and she was never anything but a hero. 

A world that exists only in her mind. 

XXXXX

Felicity peeks back between the airplane seats for the third time, noting the jewelry covering the woman’s hands as she flips the pages of the magazine, then turning rapidly back around before the woman can look up. 

“Nervous?” Oliver asks with a chuckle, sitting beside her with his broad shoulders edging over into her space. She doesn’t mind. 

“It’s just… are we sure we should be flying commercial?” She squirms against the uncomfortable cushions, keeping her voice to a whisper. “Shouldn’t we be more… covert?” 

“We’re just a couple of business associates traveling for work,” he says nonchalantly. 

“Yes, but flight manifests are ridiculously easy to-”

“Felicity.” His hand gently grabs hold of the arm she’s waving in the air, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist as he tugs it back down to the armrest. “We’re fine.” 

When she blinks up at him through her glasses, still tense despite the warmth of his hand around her arm, he adds in an even softer tone, “You’re safe. I promise.” 

She swallows and nods, easing back into the seat until he slowly lets her go. Part of her wishes she could just reach out to snag his hand and intertwine their fingers over the armrest—but that would cross several lines between them. She’s not even sure if he has… someone. In fact, she’s almost sure he must, walking around looking like that. 

They’ve got a long international flight to reach London, crammed into narrow seats with stiff backs and pitiful legroom, though for her it’s more than enough space. Oliver, however, is forced to stretch his legs every so often into the aisle, and he leans on the outer armrest to give her some extra room. He’s going through paperwork and studying up on their intel for a few cases, including his alias for an upcoming mission to Cairo, while Felicity alternates between working on some code on her laptop and watching episodes of Doctor Who (while tilting the screen so maybe he won’t see the over-the-top aliens wiggling around in plastic masks and the people running from slowly rolling Daleks). 

But after several hours, she can barely keep her eyes open, and she tries to lean her head back to doze. The angle stiffens her neck, but every time her head lolls forward she jerks awake, until she considers falling forward onto the fold-out tray like she’s sleeping at her desk. 

Then the next slide into hazy sleep lands her temple against a firm, warm surface, and she jolts up in surprise to see she’d fallen against Oliver’s shoulder. 

“It’s fine,” he murmurs as she looks up at him with bleary eyes, and she realizes that he’d actually shifted towards her to catch her head against his arm. “I don’t mind.” 

“Are you sure? I might drool—though you’re probably used to women drooling over you.” She closes her eyes with a groan. “I mean, something less horribly embarrassing—I might snore. Or talk in my sleep. Since apparently I can’t stop talking, ever, why stop with sleep—how do you even know if you talk in your sleep? Unless you sleep with people, I guess, which I-”

“Felicity, I think I can handle it,” he says with a grin. “Sleep.” 

Feeling a combination of nerves and giddiness overwhelmed by exhaustion, Felicity lets the side of her head rest tentatively against the curve of his shoulder. She wonders if there’s a proper or professional way to sleep against a colleague, but as she closes her eyes and instinctively nestles her temple against the soft fabric of his white linen shirt, she’s slipping into warm darkness before she can think herself out of this. 

When she wakes, slowly, an uncertain amount of time later, her glasses are gone and sitting on his tray beside the paperwork he’s holding with his one free hand. She has also moved her entire body closer to his, her arms wrapped loosely around his elbow, her cheekbone resting against the tilted shoulder so that her head is more fully supported by her very firm pillow. Unconsciously, she seems to have claimed him like a fold-out futon. 

After lifting one hand to swipe beneath her lips, which are dry and chapped but thankfully not leaking drool, Felicity forces herself to pull away, shaking away the sleep and fuzzy warmth as she detangles her arms from his.

“Um…” she says, squinting at him through her blurred vision, using all of her newly reawakened inhibitions to keep from leaning closer until he becomes clear. 

But she can make out the curve of his smile as he shifts his shoulders back to level in his seat. 

“For the record, you only talked once—something about ‘salmon,’” he says.

Felicity distracts herself with reaching out for her glasses so he can’t fully see the flush in her cheeks when she mumbles, “Yeah, I was dreaming about… something to, um… eat.” 

Ever since she walked in on him using the salmon ladder in the training room, her dreams had never been the same. 

“They should be bringing the next round of snacks soon,” he says. “And it’s not too much longer until we land.” 

“Thank you,” she says, nearly clarifying that it’s not for the information but for the warm place to sleep—and yet she can see in his small nod that he knows. She can’t quite determine if there’s anything else to read in those blue eyes, but she settles back into her seat and stares straight ahead. 

And manages, by the grace of the babbling gods, not to say aloud that she just slept with Oliver Queen. 

XXXXX

If Felicity expected the life of a spy to be glamorous, this trip is quickly disproving that theory. After disembarking from the cramped commercial flight, trying not to massage her numb butt cheeks in front of her purely professional colleague, Felicity trails after him towards the public bathrooms where they change into their minimal gear for the mission. Mostly, it’s just a change from the sweatpants she wore for the flight into a pantsuit that she can run in, though she really hopes it doesn’t come to running. 

When she emerges from the restrooms of Heathrow airport, Oliver waits against the wall, his own duffel bag sitting beside his feet. But she can only stare at the tailored suit he’s wearing as he checks his phone, the crisp shoulders and slim tie highlighting the breadth of his muscular body, a beast tamed into the modern world. 

Now  _ this _ is what a spy should look like. 

She had always dreamed of a plunging neckline and a high slit up her thigh, spiky heels and a knife tucked into her garter, maybe a computer in her make-up compact, if she ever ventured out from behind her computer screen and into the field. Instead, she’s got a simple blouse under a dark blue blazer, her blonde hair tied back in her usual ponytail, and her heels can best be described as “sensible.” But she looks like someone Jennings Aerospace would send to access their backup server in a thoroughly mundane crisis. 

She looks unremarkable, inconspicuous, not someone to be remembered—which is exactly what she’s supposed to be. 

And exactly what she always is. 

Still, Oliver gives her a small smile as she approaches, while she does her best not to drool all over him for the second time this trip. He bends down to take her bag from her grasp, carrying both their small carry-ons through the airport. Since they’re returning right after the mission, they don’t need more than this single change of clothes. 

Part of her regrets they won’t even stay a single night in London; that she won’t get to take obnoxious tourist pictures in front of Big Ben or the London Bridge to show her mom, whose idea of a vacation was taking her to the Venetian. 

The other part isn’t sure how she would handle a night in the same hotel as Oliver Queen—maybe even right next door. Well, she knows exactly how she would handle it, with binge-watching TV and room service and an inordinate amount of daydreaming, but still… Having him so close and still so out of reach would be an exquisite torture even the CIA couldn’t dream up. 

Their town car idles at the curb, waiting to take them directly to the London database storage facility. Felicity eyes the driver carefully, aware that he is one of their SD-6 assets… and now she knows that could mean he’s an international criminal. Of course, he could be just like her, blissfully unaware that he is not serving his country—or he could know everything, and be waiting to take the two double agents in the back of his car to an undisclosed location where two graves have already been dug. 

But Oliver greets him casually, impersonally, and slides into the backseat after depositing their bags in the trunk. Felicity follows his lead, but she feels watched and uncertain as the man climbs into the right side of the car, staying silent as he drives. 

If they were alone, she would ask Oliver if he’s been to London before, if he’s been to 221B Baker Street, if he’s eaten spotted dick (she can only imagine how that conversation would go). It’s too dark outside to even see much of what they pass, other than the yellow light of streetlamps striking old-fashioned stone architecture and modern glass and steel in turn. 

“Wait around the block—we should be no more than an hour,” Oliver tells the driver, who nods. When they both climb out of the car, Oliver turns to her and adds, “Let me do the talking inside.” 

“For once,” Felicity mutters, but Oliver hears and a brief grin flashes across his face. 

The man at the counter is nondescript, a bored security guard who puts down the donut he’d been eating when they approach. 

“Good evening,” Oliver says, and Felicity nearly gapes at the English accent spilling effortlessly from his lips. She should have realized they needed to be British (all of her case prep indicated they were employees of the very British—and very fake—Jennings Aerospace), but somehow she hadn’t put that together until Oliver’s deep, smooth voice emerged in the crisp tones of his accent. 

An involuntary shiver sparks up her spine, but she reigns in her expression of shock… and whatever else is showing on her face. After all, she’s supposedly British too—although, repressed longing is very British, she thinks. 

“We are with Jennings Aerospace, and our servers crashed—we need access to our backup immediately,” Oliver says, handing over the ID card she’d made. 

“And her?” the man replies in a droning tone after checking the ID. 

With a small fumble, Felicity hastily hands over her own ID, saying in a nearly squeaking voice and what she’s pretty sure is a Cockney accent, “Cheerio!” The man just blinks and takes the card, while Oliver pinches his lips in a brief grimace. 

“The corporate pin number?” the man asks. 

“86119,” Oliver replies without hesitation. 

“Alright then, you’re on the second floor.” The man waves towards the elevator bank, then settles back into his chair to watch some show on his monitors—a laughing teenager is being tipped backwards off a red chair. 

Felicity doesn’t relax until they’re alone in the elevator, taking a deep breath to steady herself. She can feel Oliver’s solid presence beside her, and the way he’s watching her out of the corner of his eye, but she stares straight ahead at the lit numbers on the elevator wall. 

But when the doors open on the second floor, Oliver’s hand around her elbow stops her from moving out into the empty hall. They wait until the doors slide closed again before he hits the stop button to hold it there. 

“Kuvay rented out the entire third floor,” he says, and points at the keyhole beside the ‘3’ button. “We can’t access it from here.” 

“So…” 

Oliver is already reaching up to throw the ceiling hatch open, and Felicity blinks wide eyes up at the hands he’s using to grip the edges and lift himself off the elevator floor. 

“ _ Oh _ , no.” Her palms are already sweating, and she wipes them against the fabric of her slacks. “I don’t do heights—no climbing, no elevator shafts, sorry,  _ nope _ .” 

He leans over the open hatch, arm reaching down towards her with hand outstretched, and she wants nothing more than to take it. Except it means being forcefully reminded that she’s currently suspended many feet off the ground—and she’d be leaving the only thing holding her up. Or, at least, exchanging it for Oliver’s grasp. As much as she’s dreamed of experiencing that, it was under very different circumstances. 

“Felicity, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for this.” Oliver’s voice is soft but firm, and after closing her eyes for a brief second, Felicity reaches up to grab his arm. 

She wanted to be a spy, after all. 

Her grasp on his arm is a bit slippery with sweat, but the strong grip of his hand around her is unwavering as he hauls her body up through the hatch and steadies her on her feet. Even when he turns away towards the edge, Felicity grabs hold of the back of his suit jacket to keep her weak knees from collapsing. The elevator shaft is lit by glaring white lights along dark gray concrete, a matrix of pillars criss-crossing throughout the tall space. 

When she glimpses the dark void beneath, she realizes the building must have several floors below ground, since they’re much higher than the second floor. 

At her squeak, Oliver says sharply, “Don’t look down.” 

“Too late,” she says with a gulp. 

He lets her hover just behind him, both hands wrinkling the fabric of his jacket, as he pulls the grappling gun from the back of his waistband and fires it up to a pillar above. The service entrance to the third floor, with an easier door to break open than the elevator doors beside them, stands across a gaping hole from where their elevator hovers. 

Felicity sees where this is going and starts shaking her head, stepping backwards and nearly tripping over the wiring atop the elevator—where a stumble could mean a lot more than a bruised ego. 

Oliver’s arm jerks roughly around her waist, hauling her back to his side. Feeling a bit faint, she looks up at him helplessly, focusing on those sharp blue eyes as they search her face with a  concerned frown. 

“I’m sorry,” she gasps out. “I’m trying, I just…” 

His hand pinches sharply into her waist, but it’s a reassuring gesture, the strength in his fingers focused entirely on her—while his other hand maintains his grip on the gun. 

“Felicity.” Their eyes lock, as tightly as his hold on her. “I will not let you fall.” 

Unable to look away, she just nods, and wraps her arms around his neck when he bends down so she can. This close, she can feel the hard lines of his body, can smell the whiff of woodsy cologne against his neck, could almost lean forward to nuzzle her nose against the stubble on his jaw when he finally turns his face away to look at where they’re headed. She manages to resist, though, as she focuses on quelling the butterflies churning in her stomach—the stomach currently pressed flat against his side, with her legs straddling his thigh, her trembling hands clenched in the collar of his jacket. 

The hand he uses to grasp her waist is steady and warm, digging in just as he’s about to leap. To keep herself from screaming and giving them away, she squeezes her eyes shut and imagines his close embrace in another world—perhaps as he’s holding her tightly in a slow dance, or leaning down to kiss her, where the hand at her side is slipping up under her shirt, as his fingertips brush across her bare skin… 

For a moment, she’s weightless, and in the addled daydreams of her own mind, all she feels is him. He will not let her fall. 

Except… she’s pretty sure that she’s already fallen. 

Then Oliver’s feet find the platform next to the service door, and gravity returns as her stomach twists in a whole new—and far less pleasant—way. He settles her carefully onto her feet, pressing her back against the wall and watching her closely as he lets her go, but Felicity manages to stay standing when he goes to release the grapple and return the gun to his waistband. 

“You okay?” he asks quietly. She’s still not quite sure about opening her mouth, so she just swallows and nods shakily. 

He pries the security door open and leads her through onto blessedly solid and enclosed ground, with her knees still so weak she might collapse and kiss the linoleum tile. A few long seconds pass before he releases her hand, though she may be so delirious she imagined it. 

“We need to find Kuvay’s terminal,” Oliver says as he strides down the brightly lit hallway. 

Gathering all the wits she always claims to have, Felicity takes a deep breath and hurries after him, trying not to be a complete embarrassment to the spy profession. She knows Oliver has scaled buildings without a rope, has taken down rows of armed guards, has parachuted out of planes and done who knows what else to survive on his black ops mission. Some of it she’s even watched, biting her nails and rechecking her tech again and again, as she listens on comms and monitors the satellite feed. He’s one of the few agents who never seems to mind when she butts in on the comms to ask if he’s alright, to babble some nonsense in his ears; when he replies, sometimes she can even hear the amusement in his voice, kind and friendly rather than annoyed or cruel. 

There have been moments when she wanted to be out there with him… to do what she thought was helping the world. And now she truly is, following him down a hallway on a covert mission to steal the Echelon files from a wanted criminal—and keeping them from falling into the hands of another. 

Letting a little fear of heights ruin this moment is not an option. 

Well, in the sense that she can’t really choose  _ not _ to feel it. But she can choose to ignore it. 

Of course, the great irony of her life is that as soon as she regains her footing enough to catch up to his long stride—that’s when the guards appear. 

The two young men in uniforms know instantly that Oliver and Felicity do not belong on this floor; their bored expressions flipping rapidly to shock and then determination show that this was supposed to be an easy,  _ empty _ hallway to patrol. So they’re raising their guns before Oliver can even speak. 

He still tries, though, holding his empty hand out in front of him and saying, again in that British accent, “We seem to have gotten lost-”

One of the guards swings his aim towards Felicity standing several feet back, and that’s when Oliver leaps forward, grabbing his arm to wrest the gun from his grasp as he lashes out a foot to strike the other in the stomach. 

As Felicity watches helplessly (and uselessly), Oliver takes on the two guards with a series of simple yet brutal moves meant to disarm them with as little damage as possible. They are, after all, just doing their jobs at a relatively legal establishment. 

Doing their jobs a little too well, she laments later, when one of the guards distracts Oliver enough for the other to get off a shot. 

At the echo of the shot, for one moment, Felicity fears Oliver’s been struck. 

Then she feels the pain blossom through her chest, as she stumbles back against the wall with a choked gasp. 

The guard is still holding out the gun towards her, though Oliver bashes the other guard into the wall with brutal force. Then, face fixed in a savage expression, Oliver breaks the shooter’s arm and sends him sprawling over the floor with a stomp kick that knocks the wind from the man’s chest as he falls. His skull slamming against the tile is the last sound he makes, other than the wheeze that indicates he’s at least alive. 

Which is more than Felicity can hope for, as she starts to slide down the wall, a white haze descending over her mind. 

“I’ve been shot,” she mumbles, words starting to slur together. “By a security guard, before we could even… It’s not a good story.” 

She’d sort of hoped that if she got killed as a double agent, it would at least be eventful. This is just anticlimactic. 

Oliver is in front of her between one blink and the next, one arm sliding around her as he catches her in her slow descent, crouching down with her held against his chest. 

“You’re okay, you’re safe, I’m right here,” he’s muttering in a hasty whisper, almost as though he’s reassuring himself, as his other hand searches frantically through the folds of her clothes for the wound. Under other circumstances, Oliver Queen’s hand pawing at her chest would be inciting all sorts of feelings—now, she just waits for him to uncover the blood spilling out of her. 

Except… there’s no blood. 

An expression of profound relief flickers across his face as his fingers grasp hold of a tiny metal dart sticking through her blouse, yanking it from her skin as she yelps. The spot where it hit still aches, but she realizes it’s a shallow ache, barely beneath the skin. 

“Tranq dart,” he breathes, and then he’s lifting them both back up onto their feet. “I don’t think you got the full dose.” 

Felicity’s not sure if it’s relief or the sudden wave of fatigue making a swamp of her normally quick mind, but she closes her eyes at the words. 

“So I’m not dead,” she says with a sigh. “Just tranqued, like a wild animal. Did the dart have little feathers on it? I’ve always thought they had those little feathers…” 

“Come on, we have to go—we have even less time now.” 

He takes a step away, expecting her to follow, except that her first step is like wading through water and her knee buckles as her foot lands somewhere on a ground that is tilting sideways. 

With a grimace that’s half urgency and half concern, Oliver catches her against his side, hand coming up to lift her chin. “Felicity, you have to stay awake—you need to hack into the server.” 

“I always said I could hack in my sleep,” she says, giggling as he drags her down the hallway, her feet scrambling to make some effort at taking steps beside his quick strides. “Now I can prove it—watch me.” 

“You can show me another time,” he says, voice deep and focused as he opens the door to the server room. “Right now, show me your skills with the, um…”

“Polymorphic algorithms.” The syllables run together, but they sound right in her head. 

Oliver maneuvers her into the chair before the keyboard, sitting beside her and waiting anxiously for her to deliver what she’s been brought here to do. But the room is wavering at the edges and the screen in front of her looks like a black void of stars. Oliver’s own keystrokes bring up little blinking lights that might, if she squints, be letters and numbers in some sort of pattern… dancing… like square dancing… 

“Felicity, focus,” he says. Somehow, the controlled desperation in his voice doesn’t sound like scolding, even as he grasps hold of her wrists and lifts her hands to the keyboard, his hands sliding over her tiny fingers and green-painted nails. 

“We can dance…” she murmurs, head too heavy for her neck as it falls forward before she jerks it back upright. 

With a sigh, Oliver watches her, eyebrows drawn together. And then his hand is sliding across her jaw, tilting her face towards his, and she tries to keep her eyes open because his beautiful face is getting closer… 

Then his lips are against her own, soft and warm as they close around her bottom lip and devour her in a consuming kiss that has her gasping against him. His other hand has curled around her neck, holding up her head as he draws her in closer, and he’s leading her through a fumbling kiss (on her part, at least), spreading heat through her limp body that burns away the haze. 

Her heart pounds desperately in her chest, her skin tingling with the echoes of his touch as his fingertips graze across her cheek, her breath coming in little gasps—and her mind lurches back into life. 

She’s  _ kissing _ Oliver Queen. What is this… why is he… does he maybe…?

But with that sudden jolt of awareness also comes the realization that they are in the middle of a mission, one that only she can complete, and her thoughts leap automatically into the task ahead. 

When he pulls back, she sees in the way his eyes skate across her face that he was hoping for exactly that reaction, and she hides the bitter sting of disappointment with the biting of her trembling bottom lip as she turns back to the computer terminal. If he’s about to say anything, she cuts him off, muttering through the calculations of the algorithms as she solves them rapidly beneath her fingertips. 

The files are unearthed in the mass of code within a few minutes, as her mind hastens to keep ahead of the oncoming fog that was only temporarily held at bay. 

By Oliver  _ kissing _ her. 

Once the files are downloaded onto their portable drive, the originals erased from the server with a vicious virus, Felicity feels the last of the adrenaline surge leaching out of her. She’s slumping down in the chair just as Oliver tears the drive from the port and reaches down to lift her into his arms. 

“Almost done,” he says softly above her, as her head lolls against his shoulder for the second time that day. The jet lag isn’t helping her situation much. 

The next few moments pass in and out of darkness, as he steps over the still unconscious bodies of the guards and summons the elevator to the third floor (once here, it requires no key to leave). By the time they reach the lobby, he’s placing her on her feet, using the strength in one arm to half-carry her past the man at the desk—who barely looks up from his show to acknowledge their passing. 

Her last flicker of awareness is in the back of the town car, as she lays across Oliver’s lap with his voice telling the driver to get to the airport as quickly as possible. She might have struggled to sit up, uncertain whether enjoying the solid thigh beneath her cheek was a forbidden pleasure. But her body has fallen completely to sleep, and her mind is rolling hurriedly after, so that her last conscious thought is the mumbling of Oliver’s name in the first tendrils of sleep. 

And the feeling of his fingers brushing the loosened wisps of hair back from her face. 

Or perhaps that last part is the beginning of a dream, fueled by tranquilizer drugs and memories of a tender kiss that still heats her lips. 

Because only in a dream could a kiss from Oliver Queen be… 

Real. 

XXXXX

By the time the plane lands back in Starling City, Felicity has decided that professional spies kiss each other all the time, and it never means anything. In fact, she  _ knows _ Oliver has kissed Sara before on missions, mostly to blend in at shady clubs or avoid detection--though how two gorgeous people like them kissing doesn’t draw every eye in the room, she isn’t sure. But it does the job for them, and then they’re back to work the next day as friends, with Tommy teasing Sara about her off-and-on relationship with the assassin Nyssa al Ghul and Oliver occasionally shaking his head with a smile at their banter.

So she says nothing about it, and they spend the drive back to SD-6 preparing her explanation to Malcolm about the corrupted files they’d retrieved. Oliver wants to go over the exact words she’ll use, and yeah, she gets that. 

If anything, though, her habit of babbling works in her favor; it shrouds her nervous rambling in the familiarity of her just being herself, and Malcolm thankfully reads the waver in her voice as ashamed failure or his own intimidation. By the time he gives her curt instructions to try everything she can to reinstate the data, without a lot of real sincerity behind it, his anger seems to be directed entirely at Kuvay. He leaves her office, passes Oliver hovering anxiously in the doorway, and seems to not suspect a thing. 

“How do you keep doing this?” she asks Oliver once he’s gone, quietly, just vaguely enough that anyone overhearing might assume she means going on missions in general. But he must know what she really means; the way her hands are quivering, the cold sweat soaking through the fabric bunched in her armpits, the racing heartbeat nearly drowning out her hearing. 

“I remember what’s important,” he replies, simply. He gives her a significant look when he adds, “I’ve got to go make a call. That was… Good work, Felicity.” It’s the closest he’s come to saying anything about the mission. After lingering for just a moment, he nods and turns away--undoubtedly to go call Digg and verify a check-in later. 

She watches him walk away, and wonders why she doesn’t feel more triumphant. They just wrested important data away from Malcolm, data which he might have used for who knows what terrible crime, and she was  _ out in the field _ and helping. Maybe it’s the ghost of the fake kiss still haunting her--no, she told herself she wasn’t going to dwell on that. Professional spy, right? 

Rubbing her fingertips across the round purple bruise beneath her collarbone where the tranq hit, Felicity turns back to her computer with a resigned sigh. Malcolm has already ordered another mission report for retrieving bank vault schematics in Switzerland, and she’ll have to figure out a new way to betray him right under his nose. Except this betrayal is actually a reversal of his own betrayal, so does that even count? 

When she realizes she’s muttering under her breath aloud, she closes her eyes tightly and thinks of the virtues of wiring her jaw shut. It might make kissing more difficult… but that would be a bonus, she tells herself with firm determination. 

So she spends the next few weeks not thinking about it, and thinking about how she’s not going to think about it, and trying to be firmly professional with the man that she is definitely  _ not _ thinking about. Her calls to him to plan meetings with Digg are brief and steeped in vague code, and their communications while he’s out in the field are quick and to the point. Mostly, it’s to keep from accidentally babbling about their “other” work while she’s on a comm line that the other agents can hear. 

But it’s also to keep herself from babbling something potentially much worse. Well, “worse” in the humiliation and friendship-ruining sense, not in the life-threatening sense. Because while revealing the feelings she can no longer deny might end in even more distance between them…  revealing a hint of her work for the CIA would definitely end in that distance being six feet of grave dirt. 

It helps that there’s another man occupying her thoughts in a far less pleasant way, his oily smirk and ruthless cruelty haunting her nightmares as she peers around every corner before speaking and jumps at every loud sound in the office. She’s getting better at it, at lying to his smug face the same way he has lied to her since the moment she met him, at finding an eager joy in denying his twisted whims at every turn. 

After a few weeks of rewriting code and crafting fake gadgets and hacking into security feeds to cover for Oliver’s sleight of hand in diverting Malcolm’s prizes to the CIA rather than his own still-mysterious aims, though, Felicity starts to feel a hollow frustration with it all. Digg tells her their work has never been easier than since she started; Malcolm is convinced that her extra hours in front of the computer are her compensating for a string of recent “failures” and seems oblivious; and Oliver gets a proud glimmer in his eyes every time she comes up with some new way to twist Malcolm’s agenda against him. 

And yet they still have no idea exactly what that agenda is. 

“You  _ know _ he’s bad, why can’t you just arrest him?” Felicity demands at one of their clandestine meetings, pacing back and forth through the storage locker as the two men just watch her. 

“If we shut down Malcolm right now, too many threats would just slip away,” Digg replies calmly. “The intel you and Oliver are gathering is too important-”

“But that intel is ultimately for  _ stopping _ him, right?” Her voice is rising, and she’s aware somewhere in the back of her mind that she’s yelling at a pair of agents who could kill her with their hands tied behind their backs--and yet she knows, deep in her bones, that they never would. Somehow, down in this hidden basement, is the place she feels safest in the world. 

With two men who lie for a living and whom she trusts more than anyone. 

“You’re already stopping him, Felicity,” Digg says. “You’ve done more in the last couple weeks to upset his plans than we ever have before.”

“But he’s still out there.” 

The thought won’t leave her head, as she tosses and turns in bed and lays there angrily in the dark, thinking of Malcolm in his mansion sleeping peacefully. Thinking that he’s gotten away with it all, because so far, he  _ has.  _ He still has the power at his fingertips to kill any of them and disappear, and she’s stuck giving him fake bombs and having to pretend she’s horrible at her job, so he can’t get his hands on the latest deadly weapon or surveillance software. And that cannot go on. 

After Digg leaves the storage locker first, having delivered the alternate plan for Oliver’s upcoming mission to Paris, Felicity continues to stomp back and forth over the concrete floor, nearly getting her heel stuck in a drainage grate with the force of her steps. 

“I just need access to Malcolm’s private computer,” she mutters, mostly to herself, though Oliver is leaning back against the table in the corner and watching her pace. “If I could sneak into his office-”

“No,” Oliver says, standing up straight at her words. 

“No?” She turns towards him with a glare. “You don’t think I can do it? That I can’t end this--end  _ him _ \--once and for all?” 

Oliver expels a frustrated breath. “Felicity, if anyone could… But it’s too much of a risk.” 

“More of a risk than having Malcolm Merlyn out there running around free?” she asks. The frustration makes her voice nearly shaky with stifled anger, and Oliver steps towards her in automatic response. But his arms stay at his side, and he doesn’t move any closer.

“The CIA--including us--are watching him closely,” Oliver says. “He can’t make any major moves without us knowing, and right now, it’s about patience.”

“Do you trust them? The CIA? I mean, I trust John, but…” 

“I do trust them,” he says, voice low. “And that isn’t easy, I know. Maybe not in everything, but in this? In getting Merlyn? We want the same thing.” 

“ _ No _ , we don’t. I want to stop him  _ now _ , and they want… I don’t know what they want!” she spits out, though her anger isn’t directed at him. It’s the entire world, it feels like, suddenly conspiring against her when she thought she had the control beneath her fingertips. And now there’s nothing she can control, and good and evil aren’t as simple as she wants them to be, and there’s no one she can blame--except Malcolm. She feels like she can blame Malcolm for everything. 

She moves to start pacing again, or maybe to go get some air, but his hands come up to curl around her shoulders and stop her cold. Or warm, rather, because his large hands are surprisingly warm through the thin fabric of her sweater. She stares helplessly up into his face, unable to look away. 

“They want to stop him when it will do the most good, when we can do it  _ right _ ,” he says, voice calm yet firm as he doesn’t take his eyes from hers. “Until then, we just contain him.” 

“How do you… do this? For  _ years _ ?” Her hands flutter at her sides, unsure whether she should reach up to grab his forearms on either side of her, or somehow try to pull him closer… 

“When I started, I felt just like you,” he says. Slowly, he releases her, stepping away to retreat into his own memories--and she nearly reaches out after him to draw him back. She’s been around him enough to know nothing good awaits him there. He doesn’t look at her when he continues, staring at the metal grate that walls in the locker. “I came back from the… mission, from Lian Yu, knowing the truth and wanting to burn down the world just to burn Malcolm with it. John was the one who saved my life again and again--and the lives of those I was putting in the line of fire, even some who might have deserved it. He showed me I could do this another way.” Now Oliver smiles at something in his own mind. “So did you.” 

“Me?” Felicity asks in reflex, because he isn’t looking at her when he says it. But when he does turn to glance at her, there’s that  _ thing _ back in his eyes that makes her heartbeat pick up speed. 

“From the moment you started, you argued for reducing casualties; you provided satellite specs so we could avoid guards rather than take them out; you created tech that could incapacitate combatants non-lethally,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “Even your ways of gathering information gave Malcolm fewer excuses to torture people for it… Gave  _ me _ fewer excuses to go on as I had been. Felicity…” 

His gaze is so intent on her, somehow soft and piercing all at once, pinning her in place as he turns fully towards her in the small space. The air around them suddenly warms, despite the cold metal and concrete of their surroundings, and she can almost feel him moving towards her. There’s the same haze of the moment before he kissed her, which at the time she blamed on the tranquilizer working through her system, but now… Now she can almost feel the same pull of gravity, as though she’s been orbiting him helplessly and is now hurtling towards the core of him with nothing to hold her back. 

She thinks he’s about to lift his hands to her face and draw her into him, let them crash into each other, find something stable in the shifting shadows of the world around them. With a small intake of breath, she waits for him to take that final step towards her. 

But he doesn’t. And all her recent espionage has not made her brave enough to take the step herself. 

Instead, he closes his eyes briefly and turns away, tense in a colder way than the breathless tension of before. Whatever she thought she felt has dissipated back into nothing but her own imaginings, and with a harsh bite of her bottom lip, Felicity reigns back in the raw and vulnerable pieces of herself she nearly exposed to the world. To him. 

“We just have to keep doing our work,” he says, not looking at her. “We’ll figure out what Malcolm’s up to soon, I promise, and when we do, we’ll take him down. The right way.” 

“Right,” she says, a little absentmindedly. Her anger has been drained from her, left to simmer in the back of her mind behind all of the other emotions fighting for dominance right now. It leaves her a little bit numb. 

“You should go--I’ll wait,” he says. It’s his way of ending this, simply and cleanly, of staying in their professional lane. 

It’s for the best, she tells herself. They’re not going to stop Malcolm if they’re distracted. 

But they  _ are _ going to stop him. That’s what she clings to as she leaves Oliver behind, as she walks back out into a world that still doesn’t make any sense. 

They still have their shared little world of secrets.

She’s starting to think that’s all they have, all they’ll ever have. 

And she wonders how she ever thought that would be enough. 


	2. Chapter 2

Oliver Queen has spent many years learning how to be someone else. Since the mission on Lian Yu, he’s wanted nothing else. 

Until he met their new tech consultant. 

She looked too young, with her blonde ponytail and bright pink lips and tiny painted fingernails, but they all quickly found that their new colleague had a wickedly sharp mind behind those glasses and blue eyes. Despite her tendency to babble during their mission planning meetings, her tech always worked—and saved his life more times than he can count. 

And before he even realized it, he depended on her voice in his ear to get him through each mission just as much as her gadgets. 

That has never been more true than in the weeks since she walked into that storage locker behind Digg. 

Oliver’s first reaction to seeing that telltale ponytail was fear and shame—fear for her, that she was now in just as much danger as him, and shame for himself, that she could finally see all of his lies. And yet almost instantly having someone else in that world of lies with him had lifted a weight from his shoulders that he hadn’t even realized was crushing him. 

Then the mission in London had changed everything… and nothing. 

The way she’d nuzzled into his shoulder in sleep, and the soft little sounds she made in her sleep; the feeling of her body pressed tightly against his, arms around his neck and her waist beneath his hand; and the kiss… 

Using that method to prompt adrenaline in her blood had been abrupt and extremely unprofessional, and part of him wanted to regret it. But he couldn’t. 

Because the softness of her lips parting around his own, and the little gasp caught in her throat, and the wet heat of her tongue jerking away from his intruding lips as he fell a bit too eagerly into the kiss—these were sensations that haunted his dreams, waking him up with an aching hardness that he guiltily relieves while trying (and failing) not to think of her.

And while it may be the only time he will ever allow himself to indulge in her… He’s not strong enough to regret it. 

But he will be strong enough not to repeat it. 

Oliver shakes his head to clear the memory from his mind, though it may be more dream than memory at this point, and that leads to images flashing in his thoughts that he really cannot dwell on right now—as much as certain parts of him want to. 

Because his sister is sitting across from him, leaning on the island counter, frowning at his expression while she finishes scooping the next pile of the bruschetta topping onto the slices of baguette. 

“Are you alright?” she asks. 

“Fine,” Oliver replies, turning his back to her in order to check on the slow cooker where the chicken simmers. 

“You sure you want to do all this? I’m pretty sure they’d be fine with pizza. I mean, it’s Tommy and the Lances.” Thea drizzles the balsamic over the serving plate lined with the crusts of bread. 

“It’s a little late now—and it’s a little more than just them,” he says, and just then, the doorbell rings. 

The familiar faces, friends from the “bank” whom Thea has met many times before, filter into the room with warm greetings and bottles of wine. Tommy gives Thea a big hug, as Sara flops onto the couch while Laurel offers to help finish up the hors d’oeuvres. The next guest walking in a few minutes later has Thea glaring at Oliver for the lack of notice—Roy offers a terse hello to the others before Sara yanks him down onto the couch beside her. The young agent is Oliver’s protégé, but also has a habit of hitting on his baby sister every time they’re in the same room (Oliver refuses to acknowledge that it’s Thea hitting on Roy, because his sister is  _ not allowed _ to even think about boys, ever). Yet he had to invite Roy to make this a more general work thing, so he could invite… 

Thea’s face transforms into mischievous glee when she sees the woman walking into the room, holding up a bottle of wine and staring at the three other bottles already on the counter. 

“Oh,” Felicity says, looking uncertain. “Maybe I should have brought something else… like cheese? Is this a wine and cheese thing? Do people bring cheese to things?”

Oliver smiles as he takes the wine bottle from her hand, saying, “Thank you,” as Tommy laughs and welcomes Felicity into the room. It’s warm enough that there’s no coat to take from her bare shoulders, her red dress fluttering around her knees as she stops in front of Thea’s unfamiliar face—which is curled into a smirk. 

“Felicity, this is my sister Thea,” Oliver says. “Thea, this is-”

“ _ Felicity _ ,” Thea says with relish. “I finally get to meet Ollie’s Felicity—I can always tell when it’s you calling him because of the face he makes.” 

Oliver tenses, contemplating the consequences of murdering his sister, as Felicity just blinks in confusion. The others are suddenly interested in this conversation, and Oliver realizes he has a very delicate decision to make—let them think there’s something going on between them, or come up with a lie to explain why he and Felicity have a secure line to discuss their  _ other _ work. 

But Felicity is already leaping in to clear the air—or muddle it irreparably. 

“Oh, I’m not… um, Ollie’s anything—I mean, I  _ am _ Felicity, and I assume I’m the only he knows, it’s not that common of a name—don’t even get me started on grade school and this one girl who insisted on calling me Filly, I think it was because she liked horses but maybe-”

“And Oliver always makes that face around pretty girls,” Tommy says with a laugh, clapping Oliver on the shoulder. Clearly, he thinks he’s rescuing Oliver from his sister outing his crush, and Oliver says nothing to dispel the thought. But he sees Tommy’s face darken into a brief frown before he’s stepping away, distracting Thea with a jab at Roy. 

“Should I say something else?” Felicity asks him quietly, when it’s just the two of them left beside the counter. “Because that’s… we’re not…” 

“Let them think what they want,” he says under his breath, his back to the perceptive glances still lingering on both of them. “Better that than…” 

The truth. 

He doesn’t say that what they’re imagining isn’t that far off from a different truth, because it’s a truth he refuses to acknowledge. He lives in a world steeped in lies, so constant and fluid that he’s lost sight of when he’s lying—even to himself. 

The table where they sit to eat dinner holds more lies than truths between them. He and Felicity lie to the rest of them everyday, when they let Malcolm tell them they’re working for the CIA. And they’re all lying to Thea in every moment. 

Oliver sees the guilt darken Roy’s eyes as Thea flirts with him, asking about his job in security for the bank. Long ago, Oliver made his own peace with lying to her, to keep her safe and far away from everything he’s had to do; the guilt slides down his spine without so much as a flinch to show its passing. He wonders if Roy will eventually be the same. 

But when Oliver looks across the table at Felicity, he feels a quiet but profound relief spread through him—because there are no lies between them. 

Except the one he tells himself when he hears her laugh and watches her fingers curl around the wine glass and finds himself smiling helplessly at the expression she makes when she accidentally asks him to fill her (“—and by ‘me,’ I mean my  _ glass _ , obviously, with wine, which I’ve had too much of but I need more, desperately, right now more than ever.”)

Thea just watches him with a knowing smirk that he ignores. 

The others are more than used to lying fluidly as well, spinning tales about interest rates and white collar bosses that makes Thea grow increasingly bored until she changes the topic to the latest gossip about some singer Oliver knows nothing about. Laurel and Sara argue playfully about it, with even Tommy jumping in to offer his opinion of the singer’s physique, which has Roy nodding and then shaking his head in denial after Thea’s glare. 

Felicity smiles as she watches the old friends laugh, sipping at her wine and following along until her eyes meet Oliver’s across the table. He’s not sure what she sees in his face, but her smile falls into something softer and more intimate, her wine glass held frozen in mid-air, something hesitant and fragile coming into her eyes as she looks at him. When he frowns in confused concern at her expression, there’s a flash of pain across her face, and she looks away. 

Before he can decide what to think about that, all of their phones start going off at once, stashed in pockets and purses at their sides. They all know before they check them that it will be the same message—“Merlyn 911.” A summons they cannot ignore. 

“What kind of bank has so many emergencies and odd hours?” Thea asks as they all hastily gather their things, not exactly mollified by their apologies—or the fact that this is practically routine. “Is it like a robbery or something? And they need IT there?” 

The last she’s directed at Felicity, who blinks for a moment like she’s been caught in the crosshairs. 

“It’s an issue with the servers that might mean a breach,” Oliver cuts in, sparing Felicity the lie. He’s used to them by now, and he’s gotten better over time. “I’m sorry.” 

“More cheesecake for me,” Thea says with a shrug, a gloss of wry humor over the old hurt. He kisses the side of her head and tells her that he’ll clean up when he gets back. She raises one eyebrow at him. “If you’re not sent on some last-minute business trip, right?” 

They’ve done this dance many times before; he’s not sure if it makes the phone call he’ll undoubtedly have to make later easier or harder. 

Felicity throws a brief look back at him over her shoulder as she walks out to her car. Merlyn’s message can only mean a new mission, which can only mean another horrible crime he will send these loyal agents out to commit while cloaked in lies of heroism. And he and Felicity are the only ones who know the truth. 

That short, shared look is a world of its own, a world in which he is not alone, for once. 

And, unbidden, it makes him think of other worlds in which he doesn’t need to be alone anymore. 

But there are more important things to think about at the moment. 

XXXXX

The same people that were sitting at his dining room table a half hour before now sit around the glass conference table at SD-6, with the unwelcome addition of Malcolm Merlyn standing at the head. As he has been forced to do for a couple years now, Oliver must look at him and not glare or show his animosity in any way. Felicity manages the same, though he has noticed a tension in her frame that was not there before she knew—he can only hope Malcolm doesn’t pay nearly as much attention to the tiny quirks of her body language as he does… for several reasons. 

Malcolm, oblivious to the hate brewing in the room around him, clicks a button as a picture of a man appears on the screen behind him. The man is bland and nondescript, shaved head and dark leather jacket, a computer bag slung over his shoulder as he lifts a paper coffee cup to his lips. 

“This is Dr. Brion Markov,” Malcolm says, gesturing at the screen. “A lead researcher for Unidac Industries, and the creator of a device that has the capacity for untold damage to a city such as ours—and I have the intel he intends to use it for just that purpose.” 

The others tense around the table, a sense of purpose overcoming them. 

Oliver can only wonder what the real story is. 

“Our mission is to retrieve intel on the schematics and location of the device, and if possible, retrieve the device itself.” Malcolm clicks to the next slide, a close-up of the computer bag hanging at the man’s side. “The problem is that all of that information appears to be contained in this computer, which Ms. Smoak has determined is unhackable. If you could explain, Ms. Smoak?” 

Felicity leaps up a little too hastily, still nervous when singled out by Malcolm’s attentions, but she stands beside her seat and taps on her tablet until a picture of the man and his laptop appears on the screen. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s  _ unhackable _ , necessarily, though it is extremely difficult to do so—and impossible from a distance,” she says, fidgeting with her hands. “This is an airgapped computer, meaning it isn’t hooked up to the internet at any point. The only way to see what’s inside is to get ahold of the computer itself—and even then, I’m not sure what additional protections it may have in place.” 

“Which means even if we can get one of you alone with this computer, we have no idea if you’ll be able to hack into it,” Malcolm supplies.

“What about stealing it?” Tommy asks, and his father smiles. 

“An option we already considered, I assure you. But if Markov realized the computer was missing, we believe several security measures would go instantly into effect—not the least of which being the removal of the device from its current location. If possible, we need to hack into the computer without him being aware.”

Malcolm looks at Felicity, and Oliver’s hands clench into fists beneath the table. 

“Which means, Ms. Smoak, that we need you to be in front of that computer, wherever it may be,” Malcolm says, and Felicity gapes at him. 

“Me… out in the field… again?” she says, and her eyes dart quickly to Oliver’s before turning away. He’s not sure what he reads in her expression. 

“Your last mission, while not officially a success, was at least satisfactorily executed.”

Felicity still stands awkwardly beside her chair, shaking her head. “But I was shot—with a tranq, I know, but I’m pretty sure that’s just because of England’s gun control laws, in any other situation I would be-”

“Let us hope that this mission goes smoother,” Malcolm says, and he flips the screen to an image of a large hotel. “Dr. Markov will be attending the opening gala for the Grand Vision Hotel in, of all places, Markovia—he will undoubtedly have the computer with him. We have arranged for you, Ms. Smoak, and a fellow agent to impersonate a pair of guests we have… detained.” 

The picture flips to an invitation for a Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen—for the gala happening tomorrow night. 

“I presume you would prefer Oliver as your partner on this mission? As you two worked so well together last time,” Malcolm asks, smirking at them both. 

“Oh, um, I… I mean, I guess…” Felicity says, and Oliver’s not sure if her attempts to appear nonchalant are due to Malcolm’s attentions, the knowing looks of their colleagues, or something else entirely. 

Oliver says nothing, ignoring the looks of the others. He has a feeling that Malcolm’s smile, for now jovial and teasing, could be a dangerous weapon against them both if his suspicions are confirmed. So Oliver just takes the mission folder that Laurel hands him, keeping his expression blank. 

Even as Felicity watches him with an expression of stifled uncertainty. 

“You must arrive tonight and behave as any other guests attending as tourists—at the gala, you will use one of Ms. Smoak’s devices to obtain the code for his hotel room key and use it to gain access to his room while he is occupied by the event,” Malcolm says. “Your plane leaves in two hours.” 

As they all stand from their chairs to leave and prepare, Malcolm raises his hands to freeze them in place. 

“If it is not already clear, this mission is vitally important to me and to this organization,” he says, and the righteous sincerity in his voice sickens Oliver, who can feel the ugly falsehoods and manipulation beneath even Malcolm’s best acting. “This is our chance to save this city—do not fail it.” 

Oliver and Felicity glance at each other across the table, both knowing that the only way they’ll fail their city is if they give Malcolm Merlyn exactly what he wants. 

But first they need to know what truth his lies may contain. 

XXXXX

“The way he covers all this in patriotism and heroism—it’s just  _ infuriating _ ,” Felicity says as she paces back and forth across the storage locker. “How have you not shot him yet? Why haven’t I? I mean, not having a gun is a bad start, but I could find one.” 

Oliver just watches her, arms crossed over his chest as he leans against the grated wall. He lets her work out her frustrations with Malcolm in the rapid patter of her heels over the concrete floor; his own rage is a quiet, simmering beast lying in wait within, patient enough to wait for the right move. 

He had tried to convey that to her last time, when she had been ready to march out of this room and straight into Malcolm’s clutches just for the chance to take him down. He’s been there, felt that helpless anger boiling in his veins--to see it reflected in her is at once troubling and somehow endearing. Another thing they share. 

Diggle startles them both when he abruptly opens the gate to the private locker, but they didn’t get much notice for this meeting—and they have even less time. 

“The Markov device? Do you know what it is?” Digg asks as they all gather in the center of the locker. Felicity’s anxious energy shifts instantly to her laser-like focus on the facts. 

“Malcolm said it had the power to do ‘untold damage’ to the city,” Oliver replies.

“Dr. Markov has a background in seismology,” Felicity offers, clarifying with a quick, “Earthquakes.” 

Digg looks disturbed by the news, running a hand over his chin and sighing. “That doesn’t sound good.” 

“Is it enough to  _ finally _ make our move?” Felicity asks impatiently. “The fact that he wants to steal an  _ earthquake _ machine to do who knows what with?” 

“That’s just it, though,” Digg says. “We don’t know exactly what he’d do with it.”

“Nothing good,” she mutters. 

“We don’t want to tip our hand just yet,” Digg says, his tone gentling at her glare. “We act on this and Merlyn will know he has a mole. So it’s gotta be business as usual—go on the mission, but destroy the device if you find it, in a way that Merlyn can’t blame you for. And I’ll keep checking for data on Markov, and any connections between this device and what we know of Malcolm’s plans. For now, just stay the course, Felicity.”

With a huff, Felicity turns towards the gate. “I have to go get ready for our mission.” And then she’s gone. 

“You on the same page as her? Or me?” Digg asks Oliver once her footsteps disappear up the stairwell in the distance. 

“When we take down Malcolm, I want it to stick.” Oliver sighs as he unfolds his arms from his chest. “She’s just new to this. You remember how I was when I first found out.” 

“I do, and I gotta say, I’m glad to see the ways you’ve changed.” Digg gives him an appraising look, and then his face curls into a smile. “Even more since she got here.” 

“It helps having someone I don’t have to lie to,” Oliver says, moving towards the door himself. He’s got a plane to catch. 

“Sure, man, that’s all it is,” Digg says from behind him as he leaves. 

Oliver can hear the teasing lie in his voice. 

But his own lies to himself are louder. 

XXXXX

The Grand Vision Hotel is clearly undergoing a  _ re _ -opening, Oliver thinks when their limo pulls into the circular drive in front of the building. An ornate stone façade crumbles over tilted wrought iron balconies, and tall French doors stand bookended with broken shutters, but the inside glows with warm light from the candelabras scattered throughout the glittering lobby. 

Perhaps the slight air of decay is purposeful, an artistic statement that’s continued into the lobby once they step inside. Vibrant red carpet lies beneath gilded champagne-colored walls and crystal chandeliers, with one wall taken up by a giant mahogany desk and cubbies for room keys. Only the faded, peeling-at-the-edges wallpaper and worn, tarnished gold accents mar the image of luxury being presented; beneath the scents of potpourri and lemon polish, a faint thread of mold and aged wood lingers. 

With the time difference and the trip (this time in a private plane to fit their aliases), they arrive at the hotel late at night, so that the lobby is nearly empty. Just a few employees in green jackets scurry around with last minute preparations for the gala the next night. Still slowly waking from a long nap on the flight—this time on a provided couch, which Oliver tells himself was for the best—Felicity hovers groggily at his side, yawning every so often. 

When her hand flutters over her mouth, the wedding ring on her finger glints in the candlelight, and Oliver looks away. 

“Welcome, welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Rasmussen,” the man at the desk says in heavily accented English when Oliver gives him their aliases. He hands over their room key, a modern key card, and adds, “Do you need help finding your room?”

“No, thank you,” Oliver says, picking up both their bags and heading towards the wide staircase climbing up along one wall. Their aliases are American, at least, some businessman and his wife, and Oliver spares a moment to think of the real Rasmussens and wherever Malcolm has put them. The idea that they are most likely dead stirs a few embers in the ever-burning fire of his hatred for the man, but it is a deep molten feeling that will not boil over until he can be sure Malcolm will be caught in the flames—and  _ finished _ . 

He doesn’t tell Felicity what he assumes, because he knows it will only ache in her chest. In that kind, compassionate heart of hers, that he still cannot quite believe exists in this business. 

The heart he will do anything to protect. 

With Felicity still a bit unsure of her alias, they reach the room in silence, closing the door solidly behind them with a click. The room itself is nice without being much, simple plush furniture with vague scrolling patterns and even more ambiguous artwork on the walls. 

Neither of them remark upon the single large bed in the center of the room. 

“So what do we do now?” Felicity asks, as he sets the bags down on the coffee table. “Go over mission parameters, set up the tech?” 

“We sleep,” he says. “It’s best to get acclimated to the local time as quickly as possible so we’re not out of commission tomorrow night.” 

“Why did we arrive a whole day early if the gala isn’t until tomorrow night?” 

“To blend in.” He leans down to unzip his bag, feeling the fatigue he’d held off on the plane start to settle around his eyes; Felicity will have a harder time sleeping after her nap. “Most of the guests were arriving today for sightseeing tomorrow—and the Rasmussens already indicated a check-in today.” 

“Are we… going sightseeing tomorrow?” Felicity asks. He can’t tell by the bewildered tone in her voice whether this is something she would enjoy or not; mostly he expects it’s too strange to contemplate, two spies casually taking in the tourist traps. 

“I’d like to check out a few possible locations for the device, but….yeah.”

“Oh,” she says, and again, he can’t quite read her. She stands idly in the middle of the room, almost awkwardly, looking uncertain. But he’s not sure about what. 

“Sometimes the key to being a spy is just being normal,” he says. With a small smirk, he adds, “Something I’m not always good at.” 

The attempt at humor seems to wake her out of her own thoughts, as her head jerks up and she smiles. “Me neither.” 

With that moment passed, Oliver lets her take the bathroom to get ready for bed. There’s something so domestic about hearing the clatter of her cosmetics against the marble sink, the splash of running water and the patter of bare feet over the tile. He sits on the loveseat that will not be nearly large enough to hold him and listens to the occasional murmur of her voice as she mutters to herself, unable to keep from smiling. 

And letting his fingertips trail over the wedding ring on his own finger, imagining a different life where vacations and sightseeing are just that. Where he knows how long she’ll be in the bathroom and he teases her about it; where he knows her favorite foods and allergies so she lets him pick room service for both of them; where he tries to find sports on the local channels and she lays in bed beside him on her tablet. 

Where his hands aren’t caked in blood and the only thing they have to worry about is making their flight home on time. 

The door to the bathroom opens slowly, and Felicity walks out in a baggy t-shirt and colorful print pajama pants, her hair down and her face free of make-up behind her glasses. She looks a little sheepish as she drops her bag down by the wall, as though embarrassed by her casual appearance. 

He thinks she looks fucking adorable. 

But he doesn’t say that, instead crossing into the bathroom to change into his t-shirt and sweatpants, trying to pretend this is just another mission. He’s done these sorts of things before, with Sara; and much worse, in those five years that he can’t talk about for all sorts of reasons, including the files full of black lines silencing them all. 

This is different, though. When he comes back out into the room, Felicity is sitting hesitantly on the bed, crouched on one side… with the other side flipped open in wait. 

“I thought I would sleep over there,” he says with a gesture towards the loveseat, though he figures he’d be more comfortable on the floor. 

“No, it’s—I mean, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to, but I… I don’t mind.” She shrugs, in what he imagines is an attempt at nonchalance, but the tension in her frame counters the effort. “We’ve got to be… well-rested, right?” 

Oliver can only think that a night in bed beside her will be anything but restful—but his back would regret turning down a chance at the large, firm mattress. 

“If you’re sure…” he says. 

“I am.” The words are soft, tentative, but the look in her eyes as she watches him approach is uncertain in an entirely different way. 

And that’s when he realizes, though he supposes he already knew. 

She… feels something for him. He’s hesitant to call it “love”—it could just be lust, he’s no stranger to that look in women’s (and some men’s) eyes—but there’s clearly something more in the pauses and stares and tentative touches. Just a hair’s breadth away from what he might have called dislike, the sudden turning away when he catches her gaze or the uncertainty when Malcolm paired them for this mission. 

But he knows it’s the opposite of dislike… because it’s a reflection of what he feels in himself. 

He never should have kissed her. In the weeks since, he’s told himself that it’s a classic technique for propelling adrenaline—and much kinder than a jump scare or a slap—but he knows that’s not what was on his mind in that moment. As soon as the idea occurred to him, all he could think of was tasting her sweet, plump lips against his own, and if there was the justification of the mission to cover his lapse in control than all the better. 

And yet he’s still left unsettled… by a  _ kiss _ . There were years when a kiss wouldn’t have even merited a memory, let alone a feeling of shame (he had plenty of other encounters with women that deserved that feeling far more). 

In another life—even in this life, at a different age—Oliver would have long since made his move… and he doesn’t know what would have happened then. His old self would never have appreciated Felicity for anything more than her supple curves and bright smile and maybe her cute babbling (because any version of him would find that adorable). But it’s  _ this  _ self that falls into the depths of her compassion, the quickness of her mind, the ferocity of her determination; it’s  _ this _ self that may never find a way out… or want one. 

It’s  _ this _ self that can’t bring himself to curse her with that kind of love. 

But he sees the shy smile she stifles as he slides between the sheets beside her, and he realizes she may already be cursed.

He’s not sure what to feel about that. 

“So… I guess we just… sleep,” Felicity says, as she sets her glasses on the nightstand and slips down beneath the comforter. “I mean, what else would we do, right? I certainly can’t think of anything—the TV’s probably all in Markovian, so that’s not… So just sleeping, yep, going to sleep, right… now.” 

Oliver smiles as he settles carefully onto his back, a clear foot of space between them. He’s almost surprised that Felicity isn’t piling the pillows into a wall, or perhaps she’s waiting for him to do so. But he’s had plenty of training on sleeping in tight spaces and on command, so he knows he can control where he sleeps. 

He decides not to think too much about what he’ll do if she moves in the night, curling against his side, her warm body… 

Taking a deep breath, Oliver reaches for the light switch and says softly, “Good night, Felicity.” 

Her small voice, from where she’s already turned on her side to face away from him, murmurs, “Good night, Oliver.” 

For a long moment, in the darkness, all he can hear is her soft breathing, still too rapid for sleep. He imagines that she lies awake, as aware of his body mere inches from her own as he is of hers, but when she makes a tiny little sigh, he knows that can’t have been voluntary. Or if it is, he’s in for a much… harder night than he imagined. All too quickly, though, her breathing slows and evens out until he can almost feel her settling into sleep, and he lets his own fatigue catch hold of him in turn. 

He keeps his body entirely still, confident in his training, closing his eyes and falling into darkness. 

When he wakes, it’s to pure sunlight spilling across his face. 

After a few groggy blinks, he realizes it’s not sunlight but golden hair, tousled strands with his nose buried in them. And the all-too-pleasant warmth swimming through his body is not just his own… 

But Oliver realizes that it isn’t Felicity who has turned to him—instead, he has turned onto his side, his arm thrown over her waist, his face nestled into the back of her head so that with every breath he inhales the subtle coconut of her shampoo. Her calm, quiet breaths lift the rib cage beneath his bicep, and he takes the small gratitude he can that his hand is simply flung out across the bed and not curled up against her breasts. But it’s the way her arms have wound around his, as though cradling his hand, that tears his feelings in two—a squirming guilt that he’s put them both in this awkward position… 

And a spreading warmth in his chest that has nothing to do with their shared body heat. 

He’s also immensely grateful for the space he left between their hips; although part of him yearns for the full curve of her petite body flush against his own, another distinct part of him would make that exceedingly uncomfortable. Well, uncomfortable for her… for him, it would be all too comfortable in a way that he won’t allow himself to contemplate. 

It’s later in the morning than he usually wakes, and he’s surprised Felicity managed this many  more hours of sleep; though given their usual work schedule, the opportunity to sleep extra hours must be seized when available. Something about the soft…  _ peace _ of this moment is unfamiliar to him, so unlike all the years of waking beside women (often before them, and usually eager to make a quick escape)—and then all the years of waking alone in harsh climates and cold hard beds, though that was often too generous a term. But this… he would never leave this bed if he could, never pull away from the cozy heat of the woman in his arms. 

And yet that’s exactly what he must do, as he slowly disentangles his arm from hers, pulling his body from hers by inches. Her sleepy grumble of protest is probably more for the waking that the motion provokes, since he hopes she hasn’t quite realized how much he invaded her space through the night. Even  _ if _ she feels something for him, even if he could return any of those feelings out loud, it still wouldn’t be right to impose such physical intimacy on her in her sleep. 

By the time she shifts onto her back with a stretching groan and rubs her hand over her eyes in the faint light coming in around the sides of the curtains, Oliver has already stood from the bed and made his way towards the bathroom. 

Before he closes the door, he hears only her quiet voice mumbling, “Oliver?” 

With the bathroom door between them, as he turns on the shower, he once again imagines the life where he could crawl back into bed with her, and swallow her sleepy mutterings against his lips, and savor the soft sighs and moans in her throat that he elicits with a touch they are both awake and aware enough to enjoy. 

The shower he takes is very cold. 

XXXXX

If he’s a bit colder to her as they tour the city, he hopes she doesn’t notice. It’s just that every time she smiles giddily at him before pointing out a bit of architecture or reciting a historical fact or getting excited over goddamn  _ pigeons _ , he loses a little bit more of his restraint. He remembers the warmth of her skin against his own, the way her shoulders fit perfectly in the broad curve of his own, the little sounds she made in her sleep. 

And he wants to pull her closer against him… and keep her as far from him as possible. 

She may be one of the only people who knows what his life truly entails—but that only means she can see even more of what he has to do. He’s killed, and he will again; he’s let Malcolm win so he’s not exposed, meaning untold lives harmed or worse; he’s lied and stolen and cheated and broken people with his bare hands, and sometimes… he even enjoys it. 

Felicity’s only crime is being too good at her job, and being manipulated by a madman so that what she thought were heroics are actually crimes. She doesn’t deserve any more of this life. 

She doesn’t deserve any more darkness staining her light. 

So he keeps her at a distance, making conversation only when pressed, touching her only to steady her on uneven cobblestones or offer her the local food he’s bought. If she notices, she says nothing—or rather, says everything  _ but _ the fact that he’s clearly keeping his distance. 

But he notices her pulling away slightly as the day goes on, until by the time she disappears into the bathroom to get ready for the gala, she isn’t quite making eye contact with him. 

He tells himself that’s what he wanted; but he’s getting worse at lying. 

Since she’ll take longer, he changes into his suit out in the main room, snapping the suspenders over his shoulders and waiting to put the jacket on until the last moment. Then he paces, hands in his pockets, going over the mission parameters in his head. First, they have to get near enough to Markov to scan his key card through his jacket, and then… 

And then she walks out into the room. 

Oliver’s not sure where to let his eyes fall—on the low neckline teasing along the bare cleavage beneath the glittering necklace, or the slit up her thigh where the shimmering fabric parts to reveal her strappy high heels, or the slivers of her stomach revealed by the cutouts at her waist… but he settles on her eyes, bright within the artful brushstrokes of dark make-up, free of the glasses that she holds in her hand. The uncertainty in their depths as she watches him take her in, fading as she blinks and looks away with a blush when she  _ must  _ see what he cannot conceal, no matter how much training he’s had in deceit. 

There is no deceiving himself or her in this moment. She is stunningly beautiful, and he is… undone. 

But he clears his throat, just to tear his eyes away, and says, “You look… nice.” He thinks of adding that she’ll hardly blend in looking like that, but he can’t bear the thought of diminishing the spark in her eyes as she smiles, even at his paltry and nowhere near accurate compliment. She is so much more than  _ nice _ in this moment that he’s not sure there’s even a word for it. 

“Thank you—and, um, you too, which I know is probably obvious because you’re  _ you _ , but just in case you… didn’t know… that is, in a purely professional sense, you’re… wow,” she says, getting quieter and quieter as she goes. 

He smiles as he grabs his jacket from the back of a chair, deciding the best thing to do is refocus on the mission at hand. “You ready?” 

“I just have to get my clutch bag near his jacket, right?” 

“Yes—do not engage,” he says. “If we’re successful, it’s best if he never ties it to us.” 

When they leave the hotel room, the close atmosphere of the previous moment between them evaporates; they are now Carl and Lila Rasmussen, identities that mean little to them other than the invitation. And with expecting Dr. Markov not to spend too much time at the gala, their only goal is to get in and out as quickly as possible. 

The full crowd in the ballroom downstairs in the hotel provides enough cover that they hardly need to interact with others at all—though it makes finding Markov in the bustling swarm that much harder. Oliver uses his height to pick out the bald men in the crowd, as Felicity hovers at his side and tries her best not to look nervous. The hand she tucks into his elbow is far from unwelcome, though he resists the urge to tug her in closer against his side. 

He finally spots Markov beside the buffet table, and guides Felicity into a nearby sweep so that she passes just inches beside his arm—if the man doesn’t look up from his crab puff to see the beautiful woman at his side, Oliver considers him a complete fool, even though it only makes their mission that much easier. 

“Is that it?” Felicity asks in a whisper once they are across the room, peeking into her clutch bag to see the flickering green light that indicates the card was duplicated. 

“Unless you want any of the food,” he says, teasing even though his voice is flat. 

She looks back with a slightly mournful expression at the table piled with glistening hors d’oeuvres, and Oliver knows he would sabotage this mission in a heartbeat to see her smile. But she knows lingering any longer than necessary would risk their task, so she shakes her head and they head back upstairs to Markov’s room. 

The hallway is empty when they use the device to open the door without a hitch, and the laptop is sitting on the desk like an unwrapped Christmas present. If he had less confidence in his abilities, Oliver might think this was too easy—but with Felicity’s tech and the clear mission plan, things are going exactly the way they should. Felicity hacks into the computer with ease, her fingertips clicking across the keyboard in a rapid patter, so that in a matter of minutes she’s downloading the information and introducing the virus that will slowly eat away at the schematic files. By the time Markov realizes it, they will have stolen the device and be back in the States. 

Of course, it’s never that easy. 

Just as they’re hurrying back down the hallway to the elevator, the doors open with a ding and Markov steps out. He’s looking down at his phone, but any moment he’ll glance up and see them both heading towards him in plain view. 

Oliver knows that they will just seem like attendees at the gala who are staying on his floor, barely worthy of notice other than the strangeness of their having left so early—or arriving so late. Markov may not even give them a second glance… 

Except when he realizes what happened, he might just remember the couple on his floor that night… and he might just remember their faces. 

There’s no way to disappear completely, but there is a way to obscure their faces and explain their early departure from the gala in one fell swoop, and Oliver only regrets that the second time he’s doing this, it is, once again, only in service of a mission.

And that’s when he realizes that part of him had always planned to do this again. 

He turns his body abruptly towards her, stepping forward so that she’s automatically stumbling back against the door to the nearest room, his hands coming up to cup her head so the backs of his fingers hit the wood instead of her skull. But he keeps going, until their bodies are pressed together up against the door, and her hands clutch at the edges of his jacket as she tries to find her footing. 

With her face still cradled in his hands, he leans in close, watching her eyes widen as he nears. He hopes his own eyes convey why he’s doing this, that he’s sorry, that he can make it look like they’re kissing without really kissing. In fact, he intends to do just that, getting so close that he can feel her warm breath tickling across his lips but leaving the space between… 

Until she tips her head up to capture his mouth with hers. 

And in that instant, all his training fails him. He doesn’t keep an awareness of Markov walking by, doesn’t maintain a consciousness of his surroundings—because the only thing surrounding him is  _ her _ . It’s her minty breath and soft sigh against his lips, it’s her hands yanking on his lapels to haul him closer to her, it’s her legs parting around his so they can occupy the same space. 

Oliver wonders how he ever thought he could spend the rest of his life without this. His fingers weave through her silk-soft hair, and the subtle floral scent of her perfume is like a drug, and the nip of her teeth against his lip is enough to jerk him forward with a rough sound in his throat. 

Even the sound of the door closing down the hall is not enough to pull him out of it, but suddenly Felicity’s hands have turned from holding him close to pushing him back, and he’s lifting his head from the paradise of her lips immediately. She’s breathing heavily, her cheeks flushed, her eyes still closed. 

When they open, the hurt in them jolts him from his own haze, but she’s too busy looking down the now empty hallway. 

“He’s gone,” she says flatly, quietly, and the stiffness in her frame is nothing like the molten heat against him just a moment ago. “We should get back to the room.” 

Regret burns fiercely through him, scorching away the much more pleasant heat of a few moments ago, and he walks beside her to the elevator without a word. What can he say? He tells himself he waited for her to bring it to a kiss, but she might not know that’s what he meant—she might have assumed that’s where he was headed. He’d already done it once, after all. 

And does that even change anything? They kissed for the mission, that’s all. 

That’s all it can be. 

So why does that thought sear through him even more painfully?

Any chance he may have had to say something in the elevator, though he doesn’t know what he’d say, is lost when they enter to find another amorous couple retreating from the gala to their room. Other than stifled giggles and a slurred apology that is cut off with a kiss, the couple continues on as though they’re alone, leaving Oliver and Felicity to stand awkwardly in the corner. The inches between them feel like an ocean that he cannot bring himself to cross. 

Even back inside their room, for a moment, she stays quiet. It’s unlike her, to clearly have so many thoughts in her head and hold all of them back, and he feels like the smallest word or action on his part will spill them from her lips. But he stands stiffly in the room, staring at her back a few feet in front of him, both of them uncertain where to begin. 

Or whether to pretend like it never happened at all. Maybe that would be best. 

Except he can’t stop replaying the kiss in his head, with his hands buried in his pockets so she can’t see the way they twitch, yearning to reach out for her. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice low. “There wasn’t time to ask, but I should have…” 

“I understand,” she says. When she peers back over her shoulder, all of her golden curls piled to one side over the narrow strap of her dress, her face and voice are blank in a way that is so unlike her… It frightens him. “Part of the job. Being a spy and all, kissing strangers, I get it.” 

“Felicity, you’re not-”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she says flatly, turning away. 

She takes half a step, as he contemplates grabbing hold of her, pulling her in against him—and thinks that might be the worst thing he could do right now… or the best. 

But then she’s turning back, and now her face is animated with life—angry, bitter life, but it’s so much better than that eerie blankness. “You know what? No, it’s not fine. Don’t do that again. Not… not like that.” 

Her eyes flutter closed, as though she said too much, and he nearly holds his breath waiting for her to go on. Because if he knows Felicity, she  _ will _ go on.

“I mean…” With her eyes still closed, she takes a deep breath, and when she opens them again, Oliver isn’t sure what strikes him deepest—the shimmer of tears in her eyes, or the determination fixed behind her gaze. “No, I mean exactly that. Don’t kiss me for a mission again, I can’t… Only kiss me if you mean it. Not that you… ever would, but I… I mean it.” Her voice goes quiet as she repeats, “I mean it.” 

For a long moment, he just stares at her, unable to look away and unable to think of what to say. It was something he already suspected, and yet having her look at him with those earnest blue eyes and flushed cheeks as she bares her soul—it calls to his own in a way he hadn’t realized was possible. It’s a declaration of war against the walls he’d thought were solid but are now crumbling within him. 

Because he has never wanted anything more in his life than he wants to kiss her and mean it and  _ never stop _ . 

But that is exactly what he can’t do, or so he tells himself, choosing to stay silent so that several awkward seconds pass before Felicity tears her eyes away. 

“I know it makes me a bad spy—no feelings, right? Wait, maybe that’s hookers. Or is it Jedi?” she mutters to herself, covering for the emotion quivering across her face as she goes to turn away. 

As involuntary as a breath, Oliver reaches out to graze his fingertips across her elbow, and she freezes. “Felicity,” he says. “I…”

“Don’t,” she murmurs.

“Because of the life I lead-” he begins, reciting the words he says to himself every day. 

“The life we  _ both _ lead,” she nearly yells, spinning around to face him and yank her arm away from his hand. “You don’t feel that way about me, fine, but don’t turn this into some attempt at  _ protecting _ me because that’s just insulting.” 

He sighs, runs a hand over his face, reminds himself of the blood that stains his fingers. “You don’t know what I’ve done.” 

“What you’ve  _ had _ to do—with the equipment that I created, by the way.” 

“On the island…” he says, though he can’t finish the thought. He hasn’t spoken about that mission to anyone, other than bits and pieces of the five years full of darkness and tragedy. He doesn’t think now is the time to start, other than to keep pushing her away, because the alternative… is hauling her in to drown in the darkness with him, just to save himself. And he will not do that to her. 

Evoking the five years he was gone has an effect, as she blinks and takes a breath. When she speaks again, her voice is softer. “Oliver, I can’t even pretend to know what you went through. But whatever happened there… That’s not who you are—or at least, that’s not  _ all _ of who you are. It shaped you into who you are now, which is the bravest, most self-sacrificing, kind-”

“ _ No _ ,” he says stiffly. He will not let her romanticize him in this way. “Felicity… you deserve so much better than this.” 

“Now you’re ‘it’s not you, it’s me’-ing me?” She looks at him, incredulous. “Look, just  _ say _ it, okay. You don’t see me that way, it’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” he says, and a fierce intensity boils up within him as he steps closer to her, hands taut at his sides to keep from grabbing hold of her. “I can’t  _ stop _ seeing you that way.” 

“You… what?” 

He’s just a foot away from her now, staring down into her upturned face with an intent expression. Her long dark lashes frame her eyes, eyebrows tilted up in confusion as her bright red lips part, and that’s where his gaze inevitably lands. On the scene of the crime. 

“I just want…” he begins, intending to say what he thinks he should—that he wants her to be safe, to be happy, to be free of the darkness weighing him down. All of the things he tells himself every time he catches a whiff of her perfume in the office, or her fingertips brush against his as she hands him a stack of papers, or she sits beside him on a plane with her head resting on his shoulder. Because if he were a better man, he would stay away from her. 

But the whole problem is that he is not a better man. 

So, for once, he tells the truth. “…You. I just want you.”

They’ve drifted even closer, faces drawn slowly towards each other, and he waits… He waits for sanity to return, for his self-discipline to kick in, for her to realize that this is all a terrible mistake—he waits even as he hovers ever closer, until he can feel her breath against his lips and the tip of his nose brushes in a whisper against her cheek… and still he waits. 

“Oliver,” she murmurs, and he breathes in the taste of his name on her tongue. Then, nearly silent, she asks, “Do you mean it?” 

With his eyes just inches from her, he stares her right in the eye and says simply, “Yes.” 

This time, when she lunges forward, he’s prepared—though it’s startlingly gentle and tentative, nothing like the ravening hunger of earlier. Her hands curl around the suspenders beneath his jacket, holding him against her, while his own come up to cup her cheeks as though he can capture everything she is between his fingers. He sucks her bottom lip between his own, nibbling softly on the plump flesh, as her breath hitches in her throat. 

Unlike the previous kisses, cloaked in the justification of a mission and the falsity of their aliases, this kiss leaves them both bare with soft, warm intimacy that is entirely themselves. There’s no hiding, no taking this back, no pretending this means nothing. 

And through the fire scorching him clean, Oliver realizes he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t ever want to let her out of his grasp again. 

He releases her face to draw his hands down her back, fingertips grazing across the cutouts in her dress and the tantalizing flashes of skin they reveal. At his touch, she jolts forward, tugging on his suspenders and pushing back the shoulders of his jacket. In a flurry of rapid motions, his jacket drops to the floor and he’s sliding the zipper of her dress down the length of her spine, as the suspenders dangle from his waist and she’s yanking the bottom of his dress shirt out of his pants. 

Part of him wants to slow things down, to savor this moment. 

The rest of him just wants more,  _ now _ , and revels in the luscious softness of her bare skin as he slips the straps of her dress over her shoulders. For once, he stops fighting himself--and lets himself win. 

But he pauses as the silky jeweled fabric of her dress falls to her waist. Pulling away from her lips to take her in, unable to resist the chance to see all of her, Oliver drags the backs of his knuckles around the curves of her breasts, which lift towards him as she takes a deep breath. She bites her lip and squirms lightly beneath his touch—and then he’s kissing away any uncertainty on her face, whispering, “You’re beautiful,” against her lips. 

She’s much less cautious in her perusal of him, once he’s tossed his shirt across the room and is left only in his suit pants. Her small hands slide across the scars on his chest, tiny painted nails scraping lightly in a way that makes him release a helpless grunt. When a slightly somber expression comes over her face, as though she’s about to ask about the ugly, jagged lines across his body, he reaches out to shove the rest of her dress from her hips and lifts her into his arms. There will be time later to tell her… everything. 

Right now, the last thing he wants to do is talk. 

He lays her out on the bed, watching the way her breasts bounce, his pants tightening against him. As he removes them in swift, efficient motions, Felicity pulls the pins from her hair and throws them to the floor, so that her golden curls spread out over the duvet. 

Gathering the last of his better nature, Oliver pauses over her, left in just his boxers and with her sprawled out in only her slim panties. He says roughly, “We don’t have to do this—not so soon, we could-”

“Just shut up and get in here,” Felicity says flippantly, then closes her eyes with a sigh. “I meant get  _ down _ here—though, I guess, I also sort of meant-”

He doesn’t let her finish, happy to follow her commands as instantly as he does in the field, blanketing himself over her and kissing his way down her neck and through the valley of her breasts. Her nails dig into the back of his scalp, then clutch at the muscles of his shoulders, holding onto him, onto  _ this _ , as tightly as she can. 

His fingertips slide up the smooth sides of her thighs, reaching her hips and slipping beneath the hem of her panties to start sliding them down her legs. Felicity wriggles in a combination of eagerness and helpfulness, allowing the fabric to slip beneath the luscious curves of her ass. Or maybe it’s a bit of self-consciousness, he thinks when he glances up the landscape of her body to see her biting her lip and turning a bit red. With a long expelled breath that must tickle across her bare belly, he presses a soft kiss against her hip. 

“Oliver,” she whimpers softly as he hovers ever closer, her thighs shifting restlessly on either side of his shoulders, but he will not be deterred. 

He is a man on a mission. 

When he skims his fingers through her folds, he finds her already wet and swollen, and he breathes her in with a reverence that makes her squirm around him. Her knees are folded up over his shoulders, her bare heels dragging across the muscles of his back as he grips her thighs tightly in each hand to hold her open to him. With a final glance up at her, to see her hands fluttering over her stomach as though uncertain where to land, Oliver leans in and presses a soft, lingering kiss against her clit. 

Gasping and arching her back, Felicity writhes against him as he delves deeper, using his fingers to thrust inside her and continue the onslaught of sensation. His cock is hard and throbbing within the thin cotton of his boxers, as her cries and moans build in a rhythm that pounds through his blood. As his mouth moves more and more eagerly against her, she jerks against him when his stubble rasps across her clit, her heels digging into his back as she pulls him towards her with a groan of, “Oh, God.” He does it again, deliberately and slowly, his fingers finding just the right spot within her, stroking in a building pace that leaves her breathless as her entire body falls apart around him. With wordless cries, her hands scrambling across the sheets, Felicity comes beneath him--and it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. 

She falls limp, breathing heavily, as he trails kisses up her inner thigh towards her knee, still holding her legs in his grasp. They are  _ gorgeous _ legs, he thinks as he stands, one of her ankles still resting on his shoulder. 

“Ahhh,” she moans as the movement stretches her tender body, and he gently lowers both her legs to dangle from the edge of the bed. Her words are breathless when she closes her eyes, waving a hand loosely in the air as she says,“That was… very, um… lots of… wow…” 

Oliver can’t help the smug grin that flashes across his face. 

Or the way his eyes land on her breasts, and how they heave with each breath. Before he realizes it, he’s reaching out to lean his weight on one hand on the bed beside her, the other teasing around her curves to draw his thumb across her nipple as she releases a long sigh. 

“I really should be… doing something…” she says, eyes still closed. “To you, I mean. Something… wow.” 

He dips down to press a kiss against her shoulder, dragging his lips up the side of her neck beneath her ear. “You are wow,” he murmurs, smiling against the shell of her ear. “Just you.” 

She turns her head as he pulls back, staring up into his eyes with a vulnerable softness, an expression that almost softens the raw heat of the moment into comfortable warmth. She’s holding out her heart in her hands, and turning it away now would crush it into ash. 

But he’s never been given anything so precious… and he will protect it with everything he has. That means giving her his heart in return, as collateral. 

When he cups her cheek in his hand, his thumb stroking across her cheekbone, losing himself in her beautiful blue eyes… he knows she already has his heart in her hands, unguarded and at her mercy. And for the first time in longer than he can remember, that isn’t a threat. 

He kisses her softly, a bit restrained, in case the taste of herself on his tongue is more than she’s ready for, as he nibbles on her bottom lip with a gentle affection. 

The gentleness of the moment is quick to pass, however, when she takes more than his heart in her hand--gripping him through his boxers and jolting him forward with a breath hitched in his throat. He growls against her neck as she giggles, as though a little drunk with the orgasm she’s still coming down from, and there’s not much gentleness left in him after that. He stands, nearly ripping off the last shred of clothing left between them, putting on the condom he fishes from his bag with hastily efficient motions. 

Oliver gathers her into his arms, pulling her up the bed until he can rest his knees against the mattress, gripping the side of her hips with one hand to maneuver into place. Felicity clings to him, panting slightly as every inch of their bare skin slides against the other, the tip of his cock slipping through the slickness of her folds before finding her center. 

He slides inside her with a deep groan, hearing her own shout of startled pleasure as her head falls back, still shifting their bodies into place so he can thrust deeply into her. The aftershocks of her last orgasm help build her up to the next, and Oliver’s last remnants of self control are spilling out of him with each slap of his hips against hers. The bed frame shakes against the wall, the ornate carved headboard scraping against the patterned wallpaper, and Oliver might worry about how a noise complaint from their neighbors would affect their mission if he could think about anything but the woman writhing beneath him. 

“ _ Fuck _ , Felicity,” he growls as her fingernails dig into his waist and urge him to go faster, both of them chasing climaxes that are coming on too fast. When she whimpers back, “Yes, yes,  _ please _ ,” he knows it won’t be much longer. He might be embarrassed, might try to last longer than this, but her hips are already jerking against his in a stuttering rhythm as she comes again with his name on her lips--and he follows helplessly after, letting go of the spiraling heat at the base of his spine with a shout. 

He falls onto his side next to her, careful not to crush her beneath the weight of his pleasantly limp body, her own gathered into a boneless heap in his arms. She tucks her nose beneath his chin and expels a warm breath against his neck, her hand sliding up and down his side in a casual intimacy that makes him smile against her forehead. 

Everything he has ever wanted, everything he thought he could never have, is lying here in his arms. 

And he tells himself, this time, he will never let her go. 

He’d almost forgotten what the truth sounded like.

XXXXX

Oliver wants nothing more than to spend hours in bed with her, tangled up together in lazy sleep and not-so-lazy sex, holding her in his arms—this time, on purpose and without guilt. The little sigh she makes as she snuggles against him, cheek resting on his shoulder, fills him with a warmth he didn’t know was possible. He kisses the top of her head, lingering in the smell of her shampoo. 

Then he sighs himself. “We have to go,” he says. 

“Markov wouldn’t recognize us, would he?” she asks, as she lifts her head from his shoulder to gaze up at him. 

“I don’t think so,” Oliver says, and he has a feeling the smirk that flits across his face is tinged with a little concern that it might open up that wound again. He’s not sure all the sincere kissing he’s done since then has completely erased that lie. “But that’s not it. The intel on the device’s location could change at any time—we should go to the warehouse now.” 

Felicity looks over towards the window, squinting without her glasses, though the curtains obscure everything but the fact that it’s clearly dark outside. 

“Yes, in the middle of the night,” he says with a smile he can’t fight, dragging his fingers up her spine as she glares playfully at him. “It’s a spy thing—but you don’t have to go.”

“You’re not doing this alone,” she says firmly. Then she’s climbing out of bed, smacking away the hand he tries to hold onto her with, and he lets her only because he knows they have to go. But he lingers back against the pillow, watching her naked body twist away from him with an appreciation he doesn’t bother to hide. 

He no longer has to look away when she sees him staring. 

As she dresses in the more practical gear she brought, he does the same. The moment of domesticity tugs at that same warmth inside him, as the water in the bathroom runs and she comes out hopping on one foot to put on her sock, toothbrush still sticking out of her mouth. She disappears back into the bathroom in a whirlwind of blonde hair.

When he’s dressed in his gear, with a casual jacket thrown over to hide the shoulder holster for his gun, he waits for her by the door. Just before she can open the hotel door, he grabs hold of her elbow, pulling her in against him. 

“We do this quickly—you stay by my side, always,” he murmurs as he leans in close, brushing his nose against hers. She kisses him quickly on the lips and then nods. 

“Got it, you’re in charge.” Felicity brushes a finger along the waistband of his jeans. 

“Later,” he growls, and then he’s yanking open the door himself to keep the last of his discipline from unraveling entirely. 

The trip to the warehouse, while more focused and hurried than their earlier sightseeing, is somehow much more enjoyable. Perhaps it’s the way she smiles at him every time he glances her way (he’s having trouble keeping the smile from his face himself), or the way her hand brushes against his over the gear shaft. 

But by the time they’re moving through the shadowed corners of the remote warehouse district, he manages to find his focus on the mission at hand. They park down a deserted alley several blocks from the location on Markov’s computer, hurrying down the empty, silent streets while trying to appear casual and nondescript—mostly, this is accomplished by holding her hand as they walk, something that now feels intimate and true rather than a convenient lie. 

Sneaking into the warehouse proves easy, with the simple security on a lopsided rotation that leaves several openings—either they don’t care much for the device, or they know that advanced security in an otherwise unremarkable area would only draw more attention. 

They find the device easily, as it’s the only larger mechanical contraption in the rows of shelving (and Felicity identifies it from the schematics on Markov’s computer). The blocky silver box is powerless, its lights dark and its screen blank, but Oliver can feel the deadly potential in its solid metal and ready gears. 

“How are we supposed to get this out of here by ourselves?” Felicity whispers, and yeah, Oliver should have thought more about that. Or Malcolm—if this had been a mission where Oliver actually wanted to succeed, he’d be worried. 

“Malcolm only expects the schematics and the location—retrieval was just a possibility.” He places a hand on the device, tests the weight of it on its wheeled cart. They  _ could _ move it, but the noise would attract the guards. “We tell him retrieval was too risky; he’ll send in a proper team. For now, schematics will be enough.” 

Felicity looks at him, the weight of another shared secret settling over both of them, and then she nods. Another lie carried on their backs—but the new truth between them somehow makes it lighter. 

She squats down next to the screen on one side of the device. “Let me just hack into the system and-”

“Step away from the device, Ms. Smoak.” 

The voice rings out with an echo through the cavernous warehouse, and neither of them have to look to know who it is. 

Oliver lifts slowly from his crouch into a defensive stance, automatically shifting himself between Felicity and Malcolm’s line of sight, noting the gun held casually in Malcolm’s hand. But the rustling behind him tells him that Malcolm is not alone, and the security guards whom he thought harmless are forming into position. They’re not anyone he knows from SD-6, none of the friends he knows—no one to prove that Malcolm killed them. 

He and Felicity will just quietly fail their mission, and the world will go on. 

With Malcolm Merlyn still in it. 

“Now, Oliver,” Malcolm says, having the gall to smile. “If you would just step aside… I could have one of the others do it, but I’d prefer to do it myself.” 

Oliver says nothing, unsure what exactly he means—and whether there may still be a way out for them. 

“Unless, of course, you want to do it?” Malcolm asks, something calculating coming into his eyes. “I suppose when you find out, the betrayal will be particularly… personal.”

“What are you talking about, Malcolm?” Oliver finally growls, tired of this tense game. 

“Ms. Smoak is a traitor,” Malcolm says simply. “She has been sabotaging your missions, destroying our intel and acquisitions, and no doubt feeding information to one of our enemies. She’s the only one with the access and ability to do so—and after the way recent missions have gone, I had one of our affiliates look into her system while you were here. They found all the evidence I need to execute her for treason.”

“Treason?” Felicity asks, voice sharp, and Oliver knows there’s a torrent of words waiting to burst out of her. But he takes the risk to glance at her out of the corner of his eye, to try and tell her not to speak, that Malcolm will take any excuse to kill her instantly—including keeping her from spilling the “secret” of Malcolm’s true intentions to Oliver. 

And Oliver realizes then the mistake they had made, how greedy they had gotten in finally being able to  _ stop _ Malcolm. Felicity had changed the game entirely; she had made it all too easy. 

She had changed everything. 

“You can’t just execute her.” Oliver tries to sound dispassionate, matter-of-fact, not as though his entire life hangs in the balance. Not as though somewhere along the line, when he hadn’t even realized it, her life had become his. 

“You know our line of work, Oliver,” Malcolm says. “There are no trials or juries here. Now allow me to finish this, and we can retrieve the device. For our city—our country.” 

Oliver can feel his breaths deepening, his body centering into action, the tension seizing along his muscles as he prepares to do something—to die  _ trying _ . Taking down Malcolm will be his last act… It won’t even stop the others from killing Felicity. 

But at least the world will not go on with Malcolm Merlyn still free. 

Then he looks at her. Felicity’s tiny frame leans over the device, frozen in the crosshairs, her blonde hair scattered around her face. But her eyes behind her glasses are clear and fixed on him. He can practically  _ see _ the words she’s shouting at him through that smart blue gaze, even as her lips stay pinched together in the stifled fear on her face. 

He knows what she’s saying, because he would be saying the same thing. She’s telling him to stay in cover, to stay in Malcolm’s trusted circle, to sacrifice her to the cause so their mission can go on. She’s begging him to live. 

How can she think for one second that he would ever do that? If their positions were reversed, it might make sense, because the world would be better off without someone like him in it. But her… 

She  _ is _ the world. 

Her eyes are calm, unobscured by tears, her face unbroken by emotion. All of his training is about to fail him, but she is as professional as ever as she tells him, silently, to let her die. 

Or maybe… 

Or maybe she’s telling him to  _ wait _ . 

So he waits, body still hovering on the edge of action, when she tears her eyes from his and looks back at the man who holds her fate in his hands. 

Except Oliver should have known that Felicity has always controlled her own fate.   

“I have protections in place, Malcolm,” she says, breaking the tense silence in the room. 

“Oh, you do?” Malcolm says with a sneer. 

“If I don’t input a specially designed algorithm every six hours, my system will automatically broadcast a detailed dossier on your activities to every major media outlet and government agency in the world.” Her eyes narrow as she speaks in a loud, strong voice. Though her words are calm, her hatred for Malcolm sharpens every syllable. 

Oliver has no idea if she’s lying or not; she really has improved at hiding the truth. 

And he has never been more proud of her. 

“You’re lying,” Malcolm says. 

“You can find out,” she replies simply. “I need to input the next code in less than an hour.” 

“You would destroy the covers of your fellow agents like that?” he asks. His tone is still fairly restrained, but Oliver can see the anger tightening Malcolm’s face. “You would jeopardize the safety of your-”

“Something tells me this would only  _ improve _ the safety of my country,” she says, with a defiant tilt of her head. Daring Malcolm to push her to break his precious lies out into the open in front of Oliver, in front of the other agents pointing their guns at her. 

But Oliver can see some of their gun barrels wavering with confusion at the target. 

He’s pretty sure her plan, if it  _ is _ real, would cause untold amounts of chaos--and yet it’s exactly what Malcolm fears the most. All of his secrets and lies thrust into the glaring light of the world. It’s one of the few threats he can’t easily guard against, when her death won’t silence her. 

“I will find someone to-” Malcolm begins.

“Even the best you could find would take eight hours to crack it,” she says. There’s no arrogance in her voice, just simple truth, and no one in the room questions her on it. They all know there is no one like Felicity Smoak. 

For a moment, Malcolm just stares at her, and Oliver watches them both with the uneasy tension still wracking his frame, his heart pounding in his ears. He can still leap forward and make it to Malcolm before he could lift his gun higher than a gut shot, and Oliver can fight through that to snap his neck. He’s a little shaken by how much he wants that, how much his fingers twitch at his side with the desire to wrap around the man’s neck, to feel the last breaths pass beneath his palms. 

But Malcolm lowers the gun. 

“Then we will just have to make you cooperate,” he says. “Take her.” 

The other men leap forward at the command to grab each of Felicity’s arms, and Oliver instinctively jerks towards her. But she locks eyes with him, shaking her head fiercely, staying quiet as they begin to haul her away. She’s bought herself time, and right now, they just need to get out of this warehouse alive. 

Malcolm commands several others to grab the device and wheel it after Felicity, ignoring Oliver as he focuses on his new acquisition. It would be so easy, to just kill him now, with his back turned and his manic gaze fixed upon the seismic device in his grasp. The world would be better for it. 

And then Oliver would be dead, and who knows what would happen to Felicity, locked in Malcolm’s basement being tortured. 

Even if it means leaving this monster alive for another day, Oliver will not let that happen. 

They’re all crossing the empty street outside the warehouse, two agents walking Felicity towards the van, several others maneuvering the bulky device, Malcolm strutting behind them with Oliver silent at his side—when the gunfire breaks out like a downpour of thunder. Dust spirals up into the air from the pockmarks in the asphalt, as the agents hastily reach for their own weapons to return fire. Are these the security guards that, Oliver had assumed, Malcolm killed and replaced with his own men? Or a rival crime syndicate coming for the device?

Ahead, he sees Felicity tumble to the ground, and his heart stops for a moment—before he sees her covering her head and just trying to take cover. The two agents holding her have fallen beneath the hail of bullets, and no other shots seem to be aimed in her direction. Oliver would run through the fire to get to her, but he sees Malcolm assessing his agents falling around him… and preparing to run. 

So Oliver reaches out and grabs the collar of Malcolm’s shirt, hauling him down to the ground with a rough shove that sends the man sprawling. For just a moment, Malcolm looks up at him as though he’s expecting Oliver to leap atop him as cover—and then he must see the raw hatred on Oliver’s face, twisting his features into harsh lines. 

Because his smug smile finally disappears, and Malcolm’s eyes fill with fear. 

“Oliver,” he says rapidly, bare hands held up on either side of him. “You’ve known me for years, you know my son-”

“Whom you have  _ lied _ to for his entire life, and to me as long as I’ve known you,” Oliver says, pulling the gun from the holster at his side, as Malcolm’s eyes go even wider. “You sent me to that island to die, Malcolm. Because you thought I’d found out the truth.” 

“I wasn’t sure, I had to be sure-”

“I didn’t know a thing, then--I found out quickly enough.” Oliver adjusts his grip around the gun, finger flat across the side of the trigger, twitching slightly. “Somehow, when I came back, you were dumb enough to trust me again. You shouldn’t have let me live--I won’t make that same mistake.” 

“All I want is to save our city, Oliver,” Malcolm says, ignoring the swirling spotlight from the helicopter above and the fading of gunfire as his last loyal men fall to the ground. “That device can give it a fresh start--it can give all of us a fresh start. It can make us better. Look how the island made you better.” 

Oliver thinks about killing him, then, with the chaos around them to explain it away, with nothing to stop him from ending this man once and for all. 

But he thinks of Felicity, her voice in his ear on their very first mission working together, when she was still oblivious to what Malcolm really was--and she told him, despite Malcolm’s orders, to take a different hallway and avoid killing the guards. She said there was another way. 

The island had changed him. 

_ She _ had made him better. 

“You’re right, Malcolm,” Oliver says quietly, maybe so quietly the man on the ground can’t hear him. “I am better. So I’ll let you rot in jail instead.” 

Then he lets the rest of the sounds around him drown out the rest of Malcolm’s desperate explanations, silenced by the blades of the helicopter whirring above and the distorted voice in the megaphone stating that by the authority of the United States Government, Malcolm Merlyn is under arrest. 

With the agents down and the fight over, Felicity rises shakily from the ground, eyes automatically searching out his across the street—her blonde hair whipping wildly around her face as the helicopter hovers above. When she blinks up at it, squinting in the harsh winds, Oliver follows her gaze to see Digg hanging out of the side, with his own attention fixed on Malcolm’s squirming form sprawled across the pavement. 

Oliver keeps one heavy boot on Malcolm’s chest, like a bug to be squashed underfoot.  

Something in his chest… loosens, as Felicity scrambles over to him and tucks herself beneath his arm, “accidentally” stepping on Malcolm’s outflung hand as she goes. As the CIA Agents drop to seize hold of the device, dragging it away from Malcolm’s men and his grasp. As Malcolm ceases his struggle and lies limp across the pavement, realizing that it’s all over.

It’s over. 

It’s finally over. 

XXXXX EPILOGUE XXXXX

“As soon as our surveillance systems placed Merlyn en route to Markovia, we knew he was going after the device himself,” Digg explains on the plane back to Starling City. “And that elevated his international threat level enough to make a move.” 

Apparently, Digg had jumped onto a plane almost immediately after Malcolm had, coordinating with their allies in Markovia to put a team in place. 

“What about figuring out Malcolm’s plan?” Felicity asks from her seat on one side of the plane. Oliver sits across from her, clearly deep in thought, tactical gear stripped away so he wore only a tight black t-shirt and cargo pants. 

She tries not to think about what he looked like beneath that t-shirt, what he…  _ felt _ like. But she’s never been very good at controlling her own mind. 

“We don’t know if the Markov device was part of his final plan or not--but we couldn’t let him get his hands on the thing before you could sabotage it, so we made a call.” Digg shrugs. “And besides, I couldn’t let my two best assets be taken out.” 

“You got there just in time,” Felicity says brightly. 

“A little earlier would have been nice,” Oliver grumbles. 

“Oh, I’m sorry, was my method of saving your ass not up to your standards?” 

When Digg goes off to confer with his CIA contacts and check on the agents watching Malcolm, Felicity and Oliver are left alone to stare at each other across the dim expanse of the plane. They’re cold and tired and overwhelmed… and yet she can still feel the heat of just a few hours earlier coursing languidly through her veins. Something about the near death experience sharpens the memory even more--though she can’t imagine a world where she wouldn’t be obsessing over it anyway. 

“You okay?” Oliver asks, having to raise his voice over the engines of the plane. 

“I’d be better if you were over here,” she says, nodding towards the empty seat beside her. It’s a large cargo plane, sparse and metallic, without the comforts of the private jet they took on the way to Markovia. She could use a shoulder to sleep against. 

“Not sure I trust myself,” he says with a small smile. 

“I trust you,” she says, shrugging a bit at her own sappiness when she adds, “Always.” 

He crosses the space between them with purposeful strides, and she stands up to meet him in the kiss they hadn’t been able to have after the chaos of the warehouse. With his fingers threaded through her hair to hold her close, his strong arms caging her gently in--and with Malcolm chained up in another part of the plane--Felicity feels safer than she has in… well, ever. She smiles against his lips, stroking her nose against his when he pulls slowly away, and they settle together into their seats before Digg can return. 

Some secrets might still be worth keeping. For now. 

This time, she can lean against his shoulder and wrap her arms around his in full awareness of what she’s doing, tangling their fingers together in his lap as he kisses her forehead. She falls asleep through the fading adrenaline in her veins, not with the waiting nightmares of her close escape from torture, but with the warm knowledge that this time… being with Oliver is not a dream. 

It’s real. 

Any sleep they get on the flight home is cut short when they land back on American soil, because the CIA is already taking down what they can of Malcolm’s remaining empire. The rest of the Alliance slinks out of their grasp--but that’s not what Oliver and Felicity care about right now. 

Instead, they head straight to the SD-6 offices, where the authorities are ransacking files and mining the database for information—and walking the employees out like criminals. Slowly, each of their colleagues walk past them with their hands behind their backs, faces blank or disbelieving as they stare at Oliver and Felicity standing with their captors. Roy is stoic, Laurel scowling as she observes everything carefully, Sara smirking through a twisted sense of humor. 

And Tommy… Tommy looks completely shell-shocked, face nearly white as he seeks out Oliver across the room. Felicity feels, in the pressure of Oliver’s hand tight around her own, that he wants to go to him, to tell them all that they know they’re innocent in all of this--but right now, they have to keep their distance and let the CIA debrief them. Oliver gives him a grimace of sympathy, but Tommy just blinks and looks away as he’s led away in cuffs. More than any of the others, his entire world has been ripped away from him. 

“They’ll be okay,” Felicity says softly, patting the side of his arm. Oliver just nods. 

They both know what their friends were in for—they had both lived through the world shifting beneath their feet. And they had done it alone.

But alone is one thing they could no longer claim to be. 

When the dust settles, the offices emptied and their mission debriefed, they stand in the CIA lobby together and spend a moment not saying anything. Felicity feels a second of wild doubt twisting in her gut, telling her that what they’d shared on the mission was just adrenaline and lust, a one-time thing… 

And then he reaches out to take her hand, and asks her in a low, uncertain voice, “Can I take you home?” 

They may only make it as far as the car before hastily tearing at their clothes and finding themselves in each other again. But they make it to her apartment eventually—and don’t leave for a couple days. 

But as blissful as it is, this new world keeps on spinning… and their work is not yet done. 

So, one morning a few days later, she crosses the concrete plaza towards the CIA building with a sense of responsibility thrumming in her veins, replacing the terror and impending doom that she felt the last time. It doesn’t hurt that Oliver walks at her side, a large and calming presence with his hand wrapped around hers, the calluses on his palms a familiar rasp against her skin. Now she knows how his touch feels… everywhere. 

She lets his hand go when they reach the doors, trying and failing to be professional once again, at least while they’re here. His hand ghosts across her lower back as they walk down the hall, flashing their badges past the checkpoints, just two agents heading to work in broad daylight. If Digg smirks when he sees them walk into the room side by side, the  _ not _ touching between them as obvious as any touching could be, he says nothing. 

Because they’re all focused on the people sitting around the table, staring at the three of them like a lighthouse in the storm. They’ve all undergone days of debriefing, of adjusting to the truth, of learning how Malcolm’s treachery turned them all into criminals. 

Now, sitting here in the CIA, they get the chance to change that. 

“What do we do now?” Tommy asks, having to clear his throat to get the words out in his usual easygoing tone. 

“The Alliance is still out there,” Digg says, putting up a series of photos on the projection screen. “You could all do good work here, if you want to help stop them.”

“ _ Good _ work…” Sara says, narrowing her eyes. 

“You want to undo what Malcolm has done?” Oliver says, and Felicity can tell he won’t say what they’re all thinking: what  _ they _ have done. But it’s guilt that should belong to only one person, and he’s not here anymore. “This is the way to start. To  _ actually _ be heroes. Together.” 

He looks at Felicity briefly as he says it, before the others erupt in questions and demands. She bites her lip to keep from smiling, because their confusion and sense of betrayal is fresh, but it will fade in time. They will get used to finally knowing the truth. 

After all… 

It’s a whole new world to save.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!


End file.
